Hi, our company has recently been taken over and all the management chain above me have been replaced with new people apart from my direct line manager who has been significantly demoted, and by inference, so have I. My job role has gone from being varied and influential and reduced to what was less than half of my role before, although I am very capable in this role and have more than enough to do! My performance reviews have always been excellent and I am well paid in a niche role.
Since the takeover it has been a very chaotic environment to work in with many redundancies and the team on which I work have been very much left to trying to keep things going and firefighting whilst also picking up the slack from losing literally all our colleagues who would previously ’fed’ us work. We have done our best but there are big problems with the company
it has been an extremely difficult working environment for the last 18 months but we have done our best.
About a month ago I was asked by a director, ‘Anna’, to get involved in a project, the first step of which was to briefly meet with other directors and collate their priorities. This is much more akin to my previous job role and I was excited and looking forward to helping and hopefully removing some of the chaos so we as a team could focus. This was an urgent project and by I was asked to move quickly with minimal direction to get this underway.
I spoke to 3 of the directors on individual calls and it all went well.
then I had a call with another 2 directors, let’s call them Brenda and Charles. Charles is in my direct reporting line, Brenda isn’t.
I had not met Brenda so I introduced myself and very briefly outlined my history with the company and said what I was hoping to achieve with this call. As soon as I said what team I was in Brenda started ranting. For context, she is fairly new to the business and orchestrated the exit of my experienced colleagues.
I was told we, as a team, were all meeting up all the time badmouthing the company to customers and leaking confidential information to colleagues who have been made redundant. She said she’d worked with another awful team and she’d heard we were even worse. On the call I said I was sorry, but I didn’t know what she was talking about, but she carried on in a similar vein for about 5 minutes with various accusations about my team. This isn’t true, I have had no contact with my ex colleagues other than going to their leaving do’s.
Following the call, Charles called me to say I was no longer needed on the project. I questioned why he was telling me this, not Anna, and asked if this was down to the perception of my team by Brenda and quoted back some of what she said. And this is the killer, he denied she’d said anything, he literally said it didn’t happen.
He was in the call, he knows he’s lying and he knows I know he’s lying.
My mental health, trust in the company and confidence in my work is now at rock bottom. I don’t want to leave at the moment as I have a lot going on outside of work, I am old, I usually enjoy my job, it is flexible and I am well paid.
Normal me would ask Anna for feedback, but I think that will be seen as trouble making. I feel that if this is how we are perceived then they will try and remove me or make my working life so unbearable that I’ll leave. I wish I had recorded the call - Brenda was so unreasonable that I would have raised a grievance, but if I do they will deny it happened.
What on earth can I do? I feel sick every day coming to work, I am not sleeping, this is going round and round in my head and I often find myself crying or panicking at my desk. Go off sick? Go to HR? Go to Anna? Or just battle on?