I work for an org that has fairly recently undergone a restructure. The scheme I’m working on is coming to an end after many years, and as a result, I’m likely to be facing redundancy early next year. The restructure was handled badly. We were told we might be transferred to another org at one point, and it took over 6 months with minimal communication for us all to eventually be told ‘no’ and that our jobs would be at risk. As colleagues we penned an open letter in advance, warning that the biggest challenge to the ending of the scheme would be leavers as employees were likely to jump ship knowing they were essentially working on a dying programme. We advised that management needed to handle resourcing properly to ensure a fair workload for the few employees remaining. This has not happened and 80% of the team have now left, leaving only a handful of us behind to close this programme. Since then there have been a number of grievances raised against the org within my team (myself included), morale is incredibly low and confidence in management is rock bottom.
As employees have left, it’s taken a while to backfill these positions as I imagine it’s difficult to attract staff to a short term role that’s quite stressful. Prior to a wider team meeting, I asked in the group chat if we would be receiving a resourcing update soon, as I had recently completed a task and had discovered I had been assigned to a whopping 60+ projects, 95% of them I had not heard of or been consulted on prior to opening up the task. I mentioned that due to this, my confidence in assessing them was low.
In a 1-1 with a new line manager, they accused me of being passive aggressive, pointed and suggested I was bringing team morale down?! My question was reiterated in the team meeting by a team member who echoed the same points I had raised. They also were called into a meeting with this manager who accused them of provocative questioning and suggested their questioning was having a negative impact on the team. At the end of the meetings, we both received formal summaries by this manager which read exactly like the sort of thing you’d receive after a disciplinary.
This line manager has only recently joined and I think they are naive to how miserable the situation has been for many of us for the last year. We’ve suffered through job instability, are still facing redundancy in a few months time and we all feel massively under appreciated, overworked and quite frankly, morale is in the toilet. I don’t think it’s fair to try to switch the narrative and shift blame to us as employees for essentially bringing the vibe down. Many of us have raised issues with workload and resourcing with HR and nothing has changed. It feels as though we are being forced into silence to cover up poor management practices.
I’m unsure where to go from here?! I now feel quite uncomfortable about raising any concern.
(I am actively interviewing at other organisations, it’s just taking time!!!).