I’ve worked for my current employer for 18 months, working across 6 different locations. As you can imagine a large chunk of my time has been from home due to the pandemic. I work in a management capacity of a team of people and also have other responsibilities. In the last month or so then someone quite senior has decided we need to start getting out and about more. For clarity at that point no one in my role was vaccinated. The issues are;
-due to recruitment issues we short staffed. So they’re now wanting us to go 5 of our usual locations and do our staff roles that day when they’re are staffing gaps. We can’t go to the head office as it’s locked up and we’ve been told we can’t go there
-some of my locations are 2.5+ hours away from where l live (we would usually start off at head office which is more central for my locations). Due to transport issues it took me 3.5 hours to get there the other week. I’m not willing to leave my house 6.30, work 9-5 then get home at 7.30-8.00. Then probably have to do the work from my actual job in the evening. For clarity l won’t be paid extra for any of this and it’s not in my contract. Part of the problem is people in my role at other organisation do this and senior managers like to tell us this but at the other organisations are on £15-20k+ more a year than us
-when myself and other colleagues requested more support then we were told we can’t have any and we don’t really need if. This isn’t true as all of us have been subject to role creep during the pandemic and got involved in more stuff. Plus doing 2 roles at the same time doesn’t work
My current plan is to leave for work at the usual time l used to leave for work, travel to the sites l need to go to. Then leave them at the time l would need to so l got home at the usual time as before. If lm covering for my staff then l will do that and not do my usual job. Things will back up but there you go. I’m showing some willing but not opening myself up to 70+ hour weeks. This won’t go down well but they are being unreasonable. Not sure what else to do!
Sorry it’s been so long but lots of aspects frustrating me. I quite frankly have had enough and will be leaving the job. It’s just when. All of our hard work and extra hours during the height of the pandemic seem to have been overlooked. There was no furlough, we’ve been really busy during the pandemic and landed a number of extra contracts