11 posts tagged “work”

I’m still here. 

I still don’t have a job of my own. 

The office restack work was completed by the end of October, so I was declared surplus (again) at the beginning of November.  Since then my boss has been giving me ‘meaningful tasks’ to do while the office reorganisation is under way and it’s surprisingly easy to keep occupied.  One task I have been assigned is managing the vacancies in my division, drawing up job descriptions for new posts and arranging interviews for candidates.  The irony of this is not lost on me. 

As part of our job cutting exercise we’ve had another early retirement/severance scheme and I did consider applying for that, but in the current economic climate I have no illusions about how difficult it might be for me to find another job, and I would need another one even though I could have been on a full pension if I’d been successful.  Sixty one staff from a complement of about 350 applied to go and 40 have had offers, but not all of those will actually go.  Even so, there will be more job opportunities once the jumpers have jumped. 

The other encouraging factor is that another government agency is moving here from London, and as not all their staff want to come up here there will be quite a lot of new jobs available with them. 

In the short term I’ve just been offered a temporary job for a couple of months to fill in for a manager who’s leaving in a few weeks.  His job will go into the vacancy pot, so having the opportunity to test drive it will give me an idea about whether I’d like to do it permanently, and the divisional boss a chance to see if I’m suitable from their point of view.  I’m just waiting for a start date, but I’ll probably get a month’s hand over with the outgoing guy, which is unusually good.

As I sit at my desk, removal men are taking my side drawers away to our new office across the corridor.  All around me cabinets, drawers and notice boards have been removed.

At last my team will be together in one office and I'll be able to keep an eye on all eight of them. Also, we'll be on the side of the building that's shaded in the morning, so it won't be like a sauna in the middle of the day.  No amount of leaving doors and windows open, or even running a couple of portable aircon units, prevented us all wilting as the day wore on.

I might also get rid of some of the crap my predecessor left behind that I haven't needed in the year since I took over from him.

Edit 1.  There's nothing quite like the smell of removal men in a confined space after they've been moving furniture for a couple of hours.

I'm almost staffless again today. 

One of my managers is on leave, the other couldn't come in because of a migraine, my admin guy has the day off to go to a funeral and I still have one unfilled post.  Luckily my messenger is in, and my registry admin is back from a week and a half off with a chest infection.  It seems that every week, these days, a combination of leave and sickness leaves me with a skeleton crew keeping this ship on course. 

If I had time, I'd run the Early Retirement model and see if it's worth me applying for it this year, but I'm worried about getting my hopes up when I know there's a good chance they won't let me go anyway, because it doesn't suit them right now.

Meh!

1. You never get the money back.  If it's only a day, maybe you're prepared to accept that loss, but I think a lot of people never think about that.
2. In reality you have to catch up with the work, sooner or later.

..... to switchboard operator.

My team are all out on their Christmas lunch today.  Except me.  Someone had to man the switchboard while they're all out, and I didn't want to go out with them anyway, so it's me, like Captain Hogthrob, alone at the helm.

Oh, the loneliness of command.

Late December is a stupid time to go out for Christmas lunch.  Every eatery is packed, the service is always stretched and if you're having the 'traditional' English Christmas lunch it's gonna be turkey, sprouts, roast and boiled spuds, and a couple of other veg.  The turkey is usually like cardboard and the veggies boiled beyond recognisable taste. 

And while I quite like working with the people I work with, I prefer not to spend time socialising with them.  We'd only whinge about work and I can do that any time.  When I was on the IT team we never went for Christmas lunch in December; it was rarely earlier than May, which is a much better time.  Places are much quieter, the service is better, and they're not trying to push you out of the door so they can shoe-horn the next drunken mob on to your table.

And so I'm having a learning experience instead, because I've never operated this switchboard before.  Being a 'government' office we get all kinds of interesting calls.  So far I've had a chap who wanted to report a health & safety issue because he'd seen some bloke working on his own at a vehicle scrap yard, someone from a housing association wanting info about reserved rights to buy a council house, a rather innebriated woman who wanted to complain about the shocking state of Arriva buses and someone who wanted the phone number of their local Jobcentre.  And several people who could easily have dialed the number of the person they wanted, and knew they wanted, because they call them on a regular basis.  Do our staff not tell their clients their  DDI number?  Maybe they don't want their numbers revealed, which is a shame for them because I've been telling callers the numbers so they can call direct in future and not waste my time putting them through.

One of the senior directors from HQ is visiting us today.  Staff were invited to attend a half hour informal session with him to discuss the future of our organisation.  We are currently undergoing a minimum 33% staffing cut and have already lost a substantial number of experienced staff through an early retirement/severance scheme.

The process we're undergoing appears to be:

1. The government says we need to reduce civil service staffing by at least 33% by 2008.

2. We are now in the process of shedding staff through VER/VES schemes and natural wastage but staff in some government departments are already receiving redundancy notices.  Although we're losing staff, we're expected to continue covering the same work, although we should be looking at ways of 'working smarter' and trying to identify work that we won't continue doing in the future.

3. While we're in the middle of shedding staff, we are all required to re-write our job descriptions.  We've had piles of paperwork telling us how to do this, and very tight deadlines to do it.  Once that's done, staff will be 'matched' to jobs and any that are surplus will get priority in applying for any unfilled jobs.

4. Some time in the next year or so we'll know what it is our office is actually expected to do in the future.

As you can imagine, morale is pretty low. In the recent VER/VES exercise out of a staffing complement of 350, around a hundred staff applied to leave. Thirty six were actually allowed to leave, which leaves around 60 pissed off staff who'd had enough and 'wanted out' but were forced to stay.  There will probably be another VER/VES exercise next year.

At times like this we always seem to get a visit from one of the big cheeses.  I think maybe they're trying to boost morale and reassure us that we have a meaningful future and they set aside a full 30 minutes to do this.  But it's always the same.  We already know what's going on, we know we can't do anything to influence our direction, as the government has already decided our fate, and we know we won't get any new answers from our peregrinating chief.

It seems that only one person expressed an interest in meeting the director, and our local director is 'disappointed.'  I hope he's not surprised, because if he is, he is clearly out of touch with the feelings of his staff.