No senior staff in office

[WayOutOfMyDepth]

My employer has had some people in the office throughout the pandemic as we are classed as key workers and some aspects of the job can't be done remotely. We are mostly junior in terms of grading ie most people on the lowest grade and maybe one or two from one or two grades above. Very rarely someone more senior will come in but they mostly work from home.

There's been a couple of times when people have taken ill/injured themselves and whoever is around has to deal with it.

Some colleagues have fairly complex health needs eg epilepsy, cancer not in remission etc and we have had to manage this ourselves because there is no one from HR and no one health and safety trained on site.

Me and my colleagues only earn £18k and although there is usually someone in from the grade above us they aren't always available. I've had to speak to the 999 service and don't know what I'm talking about when I do. It just doesn't feel either coherent or safe.

How can I raise this? How are other businesses handling it?

To be clear I don't want to take health and safety training myself. I don't want the responsibility given that I don't earn very much. I want our managers to come up with a solution.

Do you have a H&S manual at your work OP?
If so it should outline what to do if you have health and safety concerns.
There could be consequences for you if you don't follow procedures in that.

A colleague at my last place of work had a heart attack in the office. She had no previous health condition so it was completely out of the blue. My manager (first aid trained) was flapping about without a clue what to do while his secretary calmly called an ambulance, gave as much info as she could and passed instructions to another secretary until the paramedics arrived. In all honesty it wouldn't have made a difference if he was there, despite his seniority or training.

@WayOutOfMyDepth

Eg we called the ambulance service this week for a colleague who had took ill and none of us even knew his exact age or what medication he was on or if he had a diagnosed condition, and they ask you that and lots of other questions too. We don't have access to that kind of information. It just feels like there's gaps and also it feels like we've been left on our own.

As a manager I don't know what medications etc my team are on. I have access to records but if things have changed in that time or in an emergency I wouldn't have that information to hand

@WayOutOfMyDepth I’ve been in a similar situation. If the ambulance didn’t come there was nothing more anybody, even a trained first aider could’ve done. It’s nobody’s job to keep track of other people private medical info. People with known conditions tell their colleagues that they have a card or similar detailing it but everyone in their team knows. If they didn’t then you’re stuck unless you looked through their wallet for a card or something.

But why are we expected to assume responsibility for £18k?

@WayOutOfMyDepth - my old flatmate had epilepsy, you don't actually necessarily need an ambulance. If someone has a fit then you clear space around them and put their head on a cushion/ jacket, time it to see if it's over 5 minutes and only call an ambulance if they get injured or don't come round or it goes on longer. It's surprising that 999 didn't give the person on the phone that advice, because that's their job; given the steps taken it sounds like perhaps they were being given some advice? If not you should report the call as it's a training issue for the call handler. You can also check what to do on the NHS website: www.nhs.uk/conditions/what-to-do-if-someone-has-a-seizure-fit/. I understand why you felt scared, but there is nothing else a first aider would have done. It does sound like you all need an adult there to just tell everyone to calm down and stop sending loads of messages as well as running around the building unnecessarily, so it's worth explaining the general panic to a manager who will figure that much out.

@MilduraS

A colleague at my last place of work had a heart attack in the office. She had no previous health condition so it was completely out of the blue. My manager (first aid trained) was flapping about without a clue what to do while his secretary calmly called an ambulance, gave as much info as she could and passed instructions to another secretary until the paramedics arrived. In all honesty it wouldn't have made a difference if he was there, despite his seniority or training.

Yes, adults in the room are needed but they don't necessarily have to be managers, just people who are able to remain calm when incidents occur.

Yes, we need managers who actually manage rather than sit at home and be unavailable on teams.

@WayOutOfMyDepth

But why are we expected to assume responsibility for £18k?

A first aider would assume responsibility for under £50 extra. Would that really make a difference? Or you can call a manager. But calling ambulance is ultimately just the thing to do when another human is in medical trouble, it doesn't come with a pay grade.

I feel a lot of sympathy for you - it does sound as if management left the building without thinking through the ramifications of how that should work - but (frankly) I think the answer to why you should assume responsibility for ringing an ambulance etc for £18k is because it’s the decent thing to do. You’d do it (I hope) for someone who’d collapsed in the street so why not for a colleague? It’s been explained many times now that HR etc don’t have people’s full medical history or medication lists, so that’s a red herring - you just tell the ambulance crew as much or as little as you know.

Whilst the scenario you’ve just described is scary to watch, there’s nothing else someone senior would do other than call an ambulance.

You have a colleague who is seizing, put them on their side, call the ambulance. They ask questions you say “all I know is that his name is John and it looks like he’s having a seizure, none of us know his medical history”.

As pp have said ambulances are called by passer-bys for people who have collapsed on the street, they ask the info but if you don’t know, you don’t know. If they say the ambulance will be two hours, then again there’s nothing you can do other than ask them what to do while you wait (they’ll tell you to to X, Y and Z), then call management to say this happened, we’re waiting for an ambulance.

How many incidents have their been in the last 16 months for this to be an issue?

Tbh there's all sorts of things that have gone out the window since managers stopped coming in. We used to have really tight admin procedures but now people are just dumping stuff everywhere or even putting it in shredding if they don't know what to do with it. We have quite high turnover because the pay is so low so there's people working who've never met anyone two grades above them and with no one physically there to look at what's going on it's all gone to pot. So no one available to make decisions about safety is kind of the icing on the cake.

I had a similar situation at work, only there was only 3 of us in the office working.

However the biggest difference was the person on the phone to us at 111 talked to us calmly and told us what to do.

The ambulance also didn’t take 2 hours to arrive.

None of us had any idea what we were doing but we just did our best.

It’s never occurred to me to be angry that a member of management wasn’t in the building at the time.

HR do have information about medicines etc. We all fill in a form each year.

Or at least we used to.

Thinking about it I don't think we have since last march.

It’s never occurred to me to be angry that a member of management wasn’t in the building at the time.

Would you perhaps have been angry if there hadn't been management in the building for the last sixteen months?

Haha in that office management were hardly ever in.

Some members of staff had only ever seen them during the interview.

They were always far to busy and important. Lots of meetings and trips.

Best job I ever had to be honest.

OP, I think health and safety is a red herring here. Your whole office setup sounds like it isn’t working. How often are you managers on Teams calls with you? How can they be managing you effectively if they are all working from home and not easily available on the phone? You can’t be getting any professional development with this set up. Juniors learn from those more senior in the workplace.
I’d speak to you manager, but if this is going to continue then I’d be concerned about lack of prospects/promotion in this kind of work environnement.

Excuse the autocorrect typos!

I think your anger focused on the wrong thing. I'd be far more annoyed by the day to day stuff than a one off emergency.

I'd speak to management about who is responsible when processes for daily stuff aren't being followed. That would be reasonable. By focusing on the medical emergency, you're drawing attention away from the real issue.

@WayOutOfMyDepth

It’s never occurred to me to be angry that a member of management wasn’t in the building at the time.

Would you perhaps have been angry if there hadn't been management in the building for the last sixteen months?

But this is ultimately what you're really angry about, and you should be honest about it.

There's an argument to make that seniors should be there for morale and supervision, but another to say that bringing an unnecessary person into an office increases all employees covid risk for no obvious benefit.

Do your colleagues all feel like you? If so, it ultimately shouldn't be an argument about calling an ambulance, it should be about wider need for you all to have support. If you can't find other reasons to justify the need for a supervisor then you'll accomplish very little.

And if you knew that the reason there's no management in the building is not because they're unavailable or unavoidably detained but because for all that time they've been sat at home watching while you went out to work on the bus in a pandemic, waking up and listening to the news about 1000 people a day dying, 1800 people a day dying, wondering if today is going to be the day you catch the Rona, while your manager chooses to stay at home and lets you deal with whatever comes up in the office in the meantime, for your £18k a year? Would you still be so sanguine then?

I think you're resentful due to not being able to work from home when your managers can.
Nothing wrong with feeling like that, just own it 🤷🏼‍♀️

Sometimes the manager isn't the best person to call though. You need to ask your managers to make sure a first aider is present and that a list of them is by the door with their number on it.

@Tinypuppymom

I think you're resentful due to not being able to work from home when your managers can. Nothing wrong with feeling like that, just own it 🤷🏼‍♀️

This!

Others are right, your anger at your management team is clouding your judgement.

From what I gathered the management in my old work place was never in because they were always having ‘meetings’ in the pub.

Was I angry? No. Quite frankly things worked better without them there as they had a habit of micromanaging us.

Instead of letting the work place decend into anarchy. We worked together and supported each other.

We head each other accountable.

None of us had any authority really, none of us were paid enough to take on any responsibility.

However, in order to ensure that stuff got done we worked together as a team.

It would have been easy to let things slide but we were all adults, we were all professionals. We all took pride in our work.

I have no idea really what management actually did. I don’t care.

I know I did my job to the best of my ability. I didn’t let anger take over me.

You need to find a way to deal with your anger and resentment.