Managing a negative team

[OrdinaryFont]

After years of trying to change the team I manage I've given up today.

Im going off with stress. Fuck the strain of day after day, hour after hour of problems, sickness, "no one will cover me", "that's not my job" .

Posted too early.... the issue is that the work in the team is shared frontline work and they can't share or work as a team so they bring all the issues to me one by one. They don't work as a team and I can't make them. It's a local authority with lack of leadership, lack of opportunities. It's in an area of the UK with very few work opportunities so people stay in the same job for 20 years. They've never seen a good team half of them. It all blew up in the open plan office today and there was shouting between two of them from frustration that has been building up. One person is controlling and the others are sick of it. Management are demanding, vacancies are not filled, sickness has made a huge strain on the team, it's absolutely shit. The office is open plan, outdated, smells damp and freezing cold some days. Some people work from home some are made to work in the office. The pension is good and there really isn't that much pressure from managment - the waste is astonishing. I've had enough but there are no other jobs in this part of remote and rural uk so we are all stuck. My manager just called and said we can talk about it tomorrow.

Well you are the manager. Why allow it? Do you have a disciplinary policy?

Difficult to manage people.

People have to learnt to work together.
The culture needs to change.
You got to also lead by example.
Less negativity.

If it's not their job, why are they being expected to do it? Somebody needs to look at what they are paid to do and what they actually have to do and update their contract/grade/scale points so that they actually get some recognition of working above their grades for so long.

I think that every manager has that one employee that takes up 90% of your time, effort and energy. They're the ones that you can't ever take your eyes off because all they do is piss everyone else off and cause bad feeling. It's containment. And it's exhausting.

I had this when I started in managing a team that have for years had a rep for being negative but to be fair they generally got on with each other, they had a common goal of bitching about management. I got rid of a few and not in unethical ways, they realised things where not going to continue and things would be changing starting off with ensuring they’re doing the job they’re paid to do. They’d got away with doing the bare minimum for so long. This ended up with a few leaving off their own back, another moving to a different team and some fresh faces that I got to recruit. It made the world of difference and whilst it’s not perfect it’s so much better than it used to be. I had a motive but tried to do everything in a very supportive way and believe it or not some people don’t like that so they left.