Why is new boss being such a knob?

[Buggeroffboss]

Our old boss took ill suddenly in December last year and died shortly after. They been the boss for 20+ years, so appreciate we were all very used to them.

Following their illness I became interim boss. In April I was offered the role permanently but declined as it would mean returning to full time work. I'm bitterly regretting not taking it due to new boss!

We're a remote team, have been since many years before COVID. New boss clearly hates remote working. We do have an office, but it seats 10 people and us open to the whole business (approx 300 people) not just our department (40 people). New boss wants everyone in the office 2 days a week. HR have told him to go whistle - we are all on remote contracts and live across the whole of the UK, including channel Islands and 2 in France!

New boss is now insisting we schedule any "coffee breaks" (you know, where you brew up between meetings) and that under no circumstances are we to appear on screen with tea/ coffee if it isn't adjacent to our scheduled break. In addition he's put an embargo on lunch time errands, such as laundry, popping to the post office or collecting the car from the garage. All time is to be accounted for.

As you can imagine, morale has gone down the pan. We're a high performing department, there is 0 issues with productivity. Our work is largely invisible most of the time, lots of thinking time and idea generation which makes monitoring our day to day workloads difficult, but we always exceed our targets at quarter and year ends - so people are clearly working. In the 6 weeks he's been in there's been a noticeable change in how people are working, fewer people on early or late, most just working to their hours.

AIBU to think he's being a bit of a dick and just needs to chill the fuck out?

I make tea/coffee/onsite shop and canteen trips during my office days. Never does anyone state we can’t do that or have to log it, in fact we also go for an afternoon walk around site to get steps in if we have no meetings. He sounds like a total micromanager - huge red flag. Keeps tabs on him to back up any complaint to HR. We are adults and should be expected to be treated like we can manage our own time and workload. If anyone in the team can’t keep up with their workload, that’s an issue between manager and employee not team issue.

Complain, everyone, find the right person above him. Get him removed.

Perhaps consider buying your entire team memorial mugs with your previous boss's face on them. "John massive legend" slogan etc.

Drink liberally from them during meetings. Make it clear when challenged that they only contain water.

I wonder what he would make of someone like me who has dodgy waterworks - on medication for it so medically recognised. Would he want me to schedule bathroom breaks? How would he know whether I was in the loo or putting on a wash? Ridiculous micromanager needs a serious talking to from HR.

He's done the same to all the other heads of and a couple of people in their teams as well. Definitely not just me.

We don't all go or come back from lunch at the same time, so can do it to several of us on the same day.

Some people on this thread clearly haven’t been in a flexible and autonomous role! There’s actually a sense of panic from some that there’s no consequences!

sorry the morale has gone down OP. It’s hard to build that up again and you may lose some good people. I hope you can find a way through.

sorry if I’ve missed it but would he be willing to meet with you to chat through the concerns about morale and whether there’s a compromise?

No, he's been there 6 weeks, as I said in my OP. In April I was offered the job. When I declined it they recruited for the position. He started in June.

Well my DH makes all my hot drinks during the work day and delivers them to my desk - sometimes in the middle of meetings one appears and I don’t even leave the camera! How would he deal with that?

It's normal in a lot of places. My last office based job had core hours of 10-12 and 2-4 and outside of those hours my time was mine to manage. As long as I did 150 hours over a four week period and the work got done everyone was happy. If we had a busy couple of weeks I could work extra and reduce my hours when it was quieter. Alternatively, I could bank the extra hours and accrue up to 75 hours/10 days extra annual leave. You could even owe them up to 10 hours in every four week period but needed to work it back by the end of the next. The work got done and the world didn't end.

I had a manager like this - he would fixated on these pointless things because he was a piss poor manager (who couldn't do the job he was hired to do) and this was the only thing he could manage (control.)
I'd keep documenting all of these ridiculous incidents and go to HR about it - he's creating a hostile work environment and, if it continues, people will be forced to leave. Hopefully HR take it seriously and would rather lose 1 person than a whole team.

I have tired to meet with him to discuss the changes on several occasions but he's declined. I would like to understand his reasonings and see if we can come to an understanding where the objective is achieved but possibly in a less dictatorial fashion.

I'll be gutted if people leave because of all this. It's alarming to the impact it's had in such a short space of time. One person has already requested a department transfer.

Honestly sounds like he doesn't have enough important stuff on his plate to occupy him, or that he is focusing a lot of time on unimportant details which means he won't be able to drive much positive impact in time for his probation review.

How much time is he wasting from his monitoring and interrogation activities?

I'm curious to know if he has put into place any good team/departmental strategies or goals to compensate for his shite people management skills? Has he achieved anything yet OP other than making people slightly more miserable?

How did the company and indeed yourself track whether you’d done 150 hours in a month?

Tomorrow when he rings you to check you’re back working after your lunch break perhaps!

Not that I can see.

He came it at a weird time though, so I'm not surprised. We had our year aim kick off in April and will have a review in September where the impact of his first 3 months will show and where he'll likely be expected to pivot strategies and goals of needed.

Is there a union in your workplace? Or an HR department? Or whoever is his boss? Surely setting those rules goes way beyond what should be in anyone's contract.

Surely he can’t stop you going to the post office on your actual lunch break? Or are you suggesting people used to pop out on work time for those things? As it all adds up, and its a boss’s job to be ensuring you’re all working the hours you are paid for.

What an absolute waste of everyone's time! Does he have nothing else to do? Is he doing all this in writing - by email or some sort of internal electronic messaging system? Because if so, everyone needs to save these messages and someone needs to collect them and send the lot to his boss. As he appears to have no actual work to do, they could save themselves the cost of his salary.

This bloke sounds like he's completely out of his depth and knows very little about how to actually manage people and teams effectively. I'm wondering if he's been a bit dishonest on his CV or at interview regarding his management experience.

I'm a Civil Servant, G7 so not particularly senior, but senior enough to manage large teams, and I've attended many meetings with Ministers, Perm Secs and Director General level people. Every single one of them had a mug of tea or coffee during the meetings, as did we. Sometimes their Private Secretaries came into the meeting to deliver refreshments - the horror!

Our teams also use flexi time to manage their hours. We trust them to manage their hours and workloads and they do, without issue. As a manager who knows their staff you do recognise when something isn't right and you talk to them. It doesn't necessarily mean that someone is taking the piss though. The couple of times I've seen this was due to a serious health issue, which we supported both colleagues through.

You're doing right OP by gathering info to speak to HR. This knobhead could single handedly result in your most effective employees leaving, which wouldn't be a great result for your organisation.

He sounds insufferable. What’s your relationship with new boss’s boss like? It sounds like you’re very established and well respected in the company so could you just go to the next person up and say you have concerns about their management and you think there’s a real risk good people will leave?

Or if you’re worried that will create issues with manager, just do what you’re doing and make a record of every adverse interaction. Ask for confirmation in writing, summarise any calls where he expresses concerning requests by email afterwards and get him to agree that’s what he said, then print them out side to side with policies, any handbooks about leadership expectations etc and take them to HR/boss’s boss. You’ve already tried to raise it directly with him and he hasn’t responded well so that’s the reasonable thing you can do. Also, are you in a union? If not, it’s probably time to join one.

No a boss's job is to make sure you do the work required of you.

All this shit about scheduled tea breaks, no tea just makes employees work to rule and ruins productivity.

Regarding the tea in a time "non adjacent" bullshit.

I'd just lie to him and say it was from a thermos and wave the flask at him over teams...

I kept a timesheet and we were trusted. The work had my name on it so it would soon become obvious if I was skiving. Some people can't work autonomously or believe that people can be trusted and some of us prefer jobs where managers manage from a distance.

This

and a thermos flask made up in the morning to counteract the no brew thing

Do the people working in the office have restrictions on what they can do at lunchtime? Are they banned from going to the bost office?