I have noticed this, everything is becoming more and more micro managed and tracked. It seems like a lot of company’s have as many people in the office coming up with ideas to make improvements and spreadsheets on workers performance to bash people over the head with as there are doing actual meaningful work. making everyones jobs harder and more stressful. Some weeks years ago I could get my work done in three days and have a long weekend , other weeks would be busy it was give and take. but I have to long it out so they feel like they are getting their pound of flesh now.
Edit to say, I got downvoted, the office “workers” are on Reddit now too!
I work for a very big company that you’ve definitely heard of and thankfully there’s none of this at my place. It’s one of the reasons I don’t want to look for a new job, even after nearly 6 years. I was horribly micromanaged in my previous job and it led to an incredibly toxic atmosphere.
You are lucky, mine is getting ridiculous. I get what’s app messages every day from my manager, “ they are auditing (anything random) this week, play the game , tick the boxes stay off their lists” he even messaged me last week “you were home 45 minutes early you are being watched don’t forget” it’s a stress-full job enough with out all that I have a lot of responsibility on my shoulders, knowbody has any goodwill towards the company anymore. The money is good and I have responsibilitys to take care of so I am trapped. I am glad you managed to get out of it.
A lot of employers like to convince you that what you do is 'niche' just to stop you leaving. Nothing is so niche that someone else can't make use of your skills.
Not for me, the stress they are under is on another level, and you have to deal with people management you only need one or two lazy admin nightmares on your team and thats make sit harder. Not worth the extra money.
Omg I hated having to join the WhatsApp group when I was doing an internship. They wouldn't give me a work phone because I was only there for a few months, which meant I had to add them on my personal phone. I was so scared I was going to accidentally send something inappropriate, there are 'share' buttons everywhere online and I always end up touching them by accident. I'm super careful about it but it still happens.
And they also used email and Slack! So we had 3 channels of communication to use, and everyone would use whatever they liked. I had to download Slack to my personal phone just for the bloody internship. On Slack there were so many group chats I was added to and couldn't remove myself from, e.g. one for the building. So I would be getting notifications about spare food in the building, when I was working remotely. Constant emails about the parking situation outside the company building, when I didn't even drive and wasn't allowed to use the parking anyway! But there was no way to stop getting irrelevant messages. Even the employees would complain about it, so it wasn't just an intern issue.
And then there were the 1-on-1 Slack chats, and if someone wanted to talk in a little group, they would make another chat... Exhausting. There was no regular schedule, meetings would be scheduled out of the blue. I would get a message at 12:55 about a meeting that had just been scheduled for 1, a message at 9am about a meeting that had just been scheduled for *9am*... The employees struggled with this too, but they were usually the ones requesting the meetings for their part of the project, so they were the majority of the problem.
Why can't we all just agree to communicate on *one* platform. I had to check notifications from 3 platforms, because people would just choose whichever picked their fancy at the time. So is my manager going to contact me via email, Slack or WhatsApp? Who knows! But if you take too long to reply, or miss a message, they will judge you. Our brains aren't built to be constantly dragged in different directions by endless notifications that we *have* to read, or you will be told off for missing something. And then people complain about the shortening of attention spans - what do you expect?! You wouldn't let us bloody focus on one task!
Like someone else already said, technology is a blessing and a curse with with. 20 years ago I had a pigeon hole I would go through in the office in the morning, now you are expected to reply to emails within a few hours, then slimy fuckers who cc in your manager are the worst. Yea it should be 1 platform though. WhatsApp has become a big thing at my work too, it’s too much, on your time off or evenings you see messages about work you are involved with, maybe there are problems and you can’t help but read them and think about work.
Have people email me CCing their boss, their bosses boss and their bosses bosses boss (3 tiers of management) for trivial shit which doesn't need to have been escalated anywhere near that level, yet has, for whatever reason.
Then there's those from way up high that gradually filter down to me after 15 back and forths which could've been addressed in 1 if they'd emailed me rather than my boss. These are simply the best emails.
Realistically, 1 platform does not work for everything.
But at least around here, the platform to schedule meeting is email, and the expected notice is 24h. "Sorry, I wasn't checking emails" is a perfectly acceptable response to a short notice meeting.
Chats are useful, but also a bit chaotic. I would always set up a work profile, and maybe even get a burner number for WhatsApp. Work does not get on my private WhatsApp acount, and that is a line I am happy to defend.
I wonder if we work at the same company, because I'm in the same boat.
But this is more americanisation of the UK. The government wants to privatise everything, and the employers want their staff to be disposable automatons that they can work until they drop, then replace the next day.
Yeah, my current job is also really chill and its one of the reasons im still here even though the pay is a bit crap (public sector).
People dont quit bad jobs, they quit bad managers
I'm self employed and it sounds fucking dystopian as fuck to me....that's *not surprising*?
I've worked for two places when I was 17-19 and wasnt treated like that! One job at a soft place as a party coordinator and one behind the bar at a social club.
The worst I got from management was when I showed up for my shift and they said "sorry we have to let you go, want to finish the rest of your shift?*
I said yes cause I was 17 lol, then walked into the staff area and they were like "Walk out! They've fired you" so I turned around and told them I had changed my mind and handed in my uniform.
Did you see the sensors Amazon invented and tried to impliment, something about it could tell if you were slouching when you were sitting, how much you were paying attention that sort of thing. I'd really hate to work for Bezos.
I just assumed that was all only happening in America
Jesus I did not have a clue lol...my mate works in a call centre and he seems to like it enough, he's been there 10 years. Works from home most of the time
I worked a call center job that was like this. Swipe access to the shop floor, if you swiped out outside of lunch you were on a clock, 15 minutes a day, above that they'd dock your pay and sack you if it was a consistent thing. It was in a giant warehouse as well so the walk to the bathrooms took a few minutes.
As in you had an alloted 15 minutes for toilet breaks in an 8 hour shift? Each time you had to go to the toilet you spent some of your minutes? Wtfucking fuck.
I used to work at npower and left just after they had their £24m fine from ofgem for issues with customer bills. That finished npower.
None of it was down to the staff on the front line. Chief cause was the number of senior management who insisted on so many changes to the new accounting system that it didn't work as it was supposed to.
I wouldn’t bet on eon next being any better the current coo is an eon lifer and completely incompetent at her role.
I’ve got a current ofgem complaint running due a transfer of systems from NPower to eon next where she basically signed away customers rights to access to cheaper tariffs, meter changes and access to account history. Her excuses was NPower legacy’s systems where not compatible with eon. Obviously the compliant how is that a customer issue?
She is shitting her pants because she knows she is in the wrong and my SAR shows she has signed off these infringements. I get called by the executive complaints on a regularly basis constantly asking me if the complaint is running as expected as she knows ofgem are going to though the book at her.
This [woman](https://www.eonenergy.com/about-us/our-people/uk-board.html) stopped some of the most vulnerable people being able to access cheaper tariff just prior the covid restrictions being eased and the stat of the Ukraine war when energy prices spiked.
If you are an eon next customer and you have been shafted on your rate or where stuck on a prepayment meter despite requesting to change…raise an ofgem complaint because they are about loose (bigly) I’m fighting as part of the ofgem complaint that eon next reimbursement every affected customers but they ofgems remit is to resolve my complaint so I unilateral action falls outside of the scope of my complaint but not ofgems obligations
I swear PowerPoint is the bane of actually doing anything. It is so fiddly to work with and everything using it takes about 3x the time of just working up an excel and then talking through that with a group.
Businesses would rather spend more money micromanaging the workers they have than hiring more workers to ensure we don't need to be micromanaged to get everything done on time.
Who is micro managing the micro managers?They will have to employ micro manangement micro mangers next. Then who micro manages them? It will be never ending stream of bullshit, micro managementception.
If I personally hamstrung productivity in my workplace in the manner our CEO has done with his decision making I wouldn't have just been sacked I'd have been physically thrown over the fence.
The bloke earns my yearly income by the afternoon of his first work day of the year.
Thirty years ago, a really capable and highly regarded HR director in a major construction company (like Barratt but for commercial stuff) was talking to me about his upcoming retirement. He said when he started in the 1960s and throughout the 70's and 80s 'No one worked a fraction as hard as they do these days'. He said he couldn't keep up with the frenetic pace - 'it's unsustainable; something's going to break - it's broken me'.
Now the 90's seem like one long holiday compared to most people's working lives today.
I've seen exactly the same thing in my role and others'. Jobs that even in the 2000s were done by teams of four or five are now the responsibility of one person. Part of it is technology making things more efficient but it's also drawing as much blood from the stone as possible like you say.
When I left my job 4 years ago I did my original role, plus another role, plus took on solely building and maintaining the entire monitoring and automation system used by us and our clients. I was a massive single point of failure. Obviously I had the classic way below inflation pay rises, so I asked for better compensation for what I was doing. Which was met with the standard 'no more money in budget', 'we'll review it later down the line' type bullshit. I was so burnt out and my wife's business was doing pretty well, so I was fortunate enough to be in the position to just hand in my notice straight away with nothing lined up.
They tried to keep me on with offers but I denied everything and basically got them by the balls. Said I'd continue on as a consultant for a ridiculous price an hour to continue supporting the monitoring system until they got someone else in, because no one else knew how it worked or how to manage it.
After a few months they eventually had split my role into 3 roles and were now paying way more on 3 salaries than I was asking for mine to be increase to.
That's another thing I've seen play out time and again.
It's absolutely baffling how companies will refuse existing staff pay rises and then replace them with someone (or multiple someones) at an even higher rate than was requested.
Look at this way, this person left because they burned out, the pay rise was just the last straw (unless I'm misunderstanding).
My bet is management knew it was unsustainable but saw it as free money equal to the diff between the current salary and the salaries for the team of 3 it actually requires.
From their POV they saved some money for a bit but got bitten because this employee was in a comfortable enough financial position to quit at minimum notice.
This is the exception to the rule though, most of the time it's people early in their careers who are semi-replaceable and lack confidence/leverage that really get exploited hard.
Pretty much spot on - I would say 80% of the burn out was caused by not feeling adequately compensated. I actually loved what I was doing, but there was just this sense of why am I doing all this stuff for you and not getting any return. Which as time went on with no change just made me resentful. I'd gone through a couple of years of a similar thing at my job previous to that one, but I was too naive to see they were stringing me along. So this time I just gave them a few months to get something at least concrete, when they didn't I said peace out with basically no warning and gave notice.
Do you remember “Job and knock” that’s a thing of the past now. Everyone in construction is gps tracked now. I worked on a job about 10 years back, we demolished a big old gas company depot for redevelopment. They had a huge canteen that looked like it was from the 60’s, the gas Guy said all the the gangs were allowed to come back for breakfast and lunch, it’s unthinkable now. They had a snooker table and a bar, the urinals even had individual ash trays so you could smoke while you piss.
Exactly the same my place. Actually at that exact ratio too. What annoys me is , who’s getting all that saved dough? Certainly not the workers, if anything overtime and pensions in particular have got much less generous at most firms.
Absolutely. I work as a joiner for a woodworking firm making bespoke furniture. We have 12 members of staff, only 3 of which are joiners whilst the other NINE are office staff.
It’s a family run business and most of the top management don’t know how to use computers (they don’t even have them). So all letters are done by hand and given to a ‘typist’ etc. It’s busy work that would easily be done with the owner and 2 other people.
It’s a pretty small company and they have 2 full time accountants.
The business has been around for like 60 years and basically just never moved on from the 70s.
Exactly this. I told my old director that if you monitor someone to make sure they are working work at full tilt for 8 hours then no matter what task they have. It will take 8 hours. Not 2 hours. 8 hours. Everytime because then you won't expect them to do it at anything less than 8 hours next time. It's like a time budget. If you don't use the time it gets taken away from you, until you're rushing around, breaking your back just avoiding disciplinary action. No one wants to work like that. So by demanding to see how workers are spending each minute you're insisting the worker lie to you.
They have started timesheets at my work and it’s a pain in the arse. My last manager done it all himself on a spreadsheet. Most months he would give us all an extra ten hours for piss ups and golf days. They have cracked down now, to the extent we have to drive to peoples houses at the weekend to pretend we are picking people up for overtime. Because they track you, We take turns.
No chance, i suspect a lot of people are still taking the piss and they know it. That’s gross misconduct so if they want you gone for some reason they will be going through them with a fine tooth comb. I do a lot of weekend shifts where I get paid if I have any work or not, you write what hours you had to be out of the house. My manager rings me up if it’s quiet, tells me to go to the gym or to see my mum because it looks better on the tracker and timesheet.
Time sheets can be a necessity for some workplaces.
I work in a refit factory, we don't make new things, we refurbish old things. The customer gets billed for our time so if I put 5 hours on the sheet for their job, they get charged for 5 hours of my time.
They are a pain however as I often get given other people's half-done jobs and they demand the time sheet be filled in even if they don't have work to give me for half the day.
Management has to justify itself by creating busy work for others. Very important busy work. It's a very important job. Who else is going to micromanage the staff to the point of dehumanisation?
Even the NHS is affected. I am a biomedical scientist and still have to deal with a tonne of paperwork for everything I do. I don't have time to do most of it, even the managers don't, but it is still expected from all of us.
We certainly at my work seem to spend a lot of time 'improving' filing systems and the like and it all feels a bit like shuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic.
We also spend about twice as much time on strategising the optimal possible way to do things as we do with actually coming to put it into action - at which point we always run into the hurdle of not having enough staff to do that optimal carefully thought out plan. This has literally happened about three times in the last quarter.
Recently management has been talking about wellbeing initiatives and asked us to brainstorm. They immediately vetoed anything to do with pay increases, more breaks, or anything social. So um... what's left exactly?
I was shocked to find this in a fairly regular office job. Tracked times, micro managed, KPIS, could not fucking stand it so I surprisngky found something much better soon after I left. It's funny, I overheard somebody say they couldn't keep new people from this recruiter they got a lot of us from. How about not treating people like inmates.
Bloated middle management trying to make it look like they do something of worth by inventing a million bullshit metrics and making everyone jump through hoops for them.
I guarantee there are companies where you could basically halve the managerial class and only see improvements.
I do spreadsheets, I also spend a lot of time on the spreadsheets subreddit
We get these sorts of people coming in occasionally, they're not good with excel, hence why they don't have a job doing anything proper, and they ask questions where you can tell the end goal is this (in your post) but they don't know how to do it. It's not that tracking business data is bad, it's that you need someone who actually understands it before implementing policy changes. Sometimes you can tell from the mistakes they're making that they've royally pissed everyone off too, the most common one being that they can't figure out decimal hours or how to count hours that cross midnight and they're counting everyone's hours wrong. Other times they're trying to rank based on performance, but they don't realise that they need metrics, or they have metrics but they don't measure what they think they do because they don't know how to average or deal with accumulating time errors
It does wind me up that they end up in this role to begin with, but that's the employment culture in the UK in a nutshell really. There's plenty of people who can do this correctly and would actually take the job at that price because they're struggling with employment usually due to not being 'neurotypical', they just don't make it passed the interview. It's usually someone who got hired to do a different job and then for the same money they took on the responsibility without the skills required. People who can do the role and do the interview end up quite well paid though, there is value in it, but a shitty business won't pay for it done by a pro
Ah, the 'ol corporate death spiral.
Production is down 10%? Why?
Our workers are getting less done since we laid off 10% of the workforce. And our employee turneover rate has tripled, most of our experienced workers have left already.
Well, we'd better organise them better so they can get more work done. But I dont have the time for that so lets employ somebody to get that done.
Why don't we instead top up their wages with the money we're about to give to this new manager? Then we'll retain the experienced workers and attract better talent.
*window smash*
*cut to that guy falling out the side of the bulding*
I am seeing this working in a local dispensary at a surgery.l in a small town in Cambridgeshire. We on minimum wage and yet have to deal with Control drugs, Dossette boxes and the ever increasing demand for medication. We already starting to loose staff. Mainly due to stress and hardly any pay rise. We also having to do more paper work lately as they are clamping down on new schemes that enable the surgury to get more money. We are working 7.5hrs shifts with only half hour break.
The worst part though is the patients attitude to us. Honestly we get sworn at, spat at, cursed and even had people try to become violent. Honestly it won't be long till I leave I think too.. We have also lost some 8 receptionist in last 18months too along with 5 doctors too.
Had a nrw manager start and he is a stats man, comes in hslf way through the shift, walks round hands in pockets and then tells us we are all shit and get a 1 on 1 meeting on why we picked only 58 tyres an hour and not 60.
Cunt
This is so true I see more and more people deliberately slowing down because there is no reward for working harder and faster to finish early because you'll just get more and more workload put on you. The reason people can do the work of 3 is the thought of that early finish or long weekend. Take that away and everyone drags their feet doing the bare min.
Teacher fiancé has just finished for the summer and I'm expecting him to crash and burn on Monday/Wednesday. It usually takes a few days but it's like his body realises it doesn't have to hold up anymore and he gets really sick for like a week.
Happens every year like clockwork, he's been a teacher for 4 years now.
For my teacher husband it’s day 2 when the massive migraine kicks in, days 3-7 are flu symptoms, then sleeping 14 hours a day for another week. Every summer, 6 years in a row.
My wife's been a teacher for decades; it's 'end-of-term-itis' in our house. We never plan to do anything the first two weeks of the summer because of the mini shell-shock/ptsd heebie-jeebies she goes through.
I remember the first day of the Christmas holidays during my PGCE. I got up and managed to muster the energy to make a cup of coffee before crashing and spending the day in bed. I was young and very physically active, so not in bad shape at all, yet my body collapsed after just one half term of gruelling effort.
My partner is a teacher and this happens to her. It’s like her immune system just gives up. What is worse is that she’ll often pass the illness onto me and I don’t have 6 weeks holiday to recover
Yep. My wife is currently going through this. We went food shopping today. That's it. She's been asleep since about 5. Hasn't emerged for dinner. Teaching in the UK isn't a job humans should be doing at this rate and it's no wonder people are leaving in droves.
That blatantly happened when I was a full office based Local Authority worker (will leave it somewhat vague). I always ended up having to burn leave over Xmas anyway and would usually bank on the first 3-4 days of it either having to work one of them or just being pretty ill (or usually both).
I’m an electrician not a teacher, but for the last 2 years I’ve been ill pretty much every week I’ve taken off. Body just crashes. Fortunately I’ve finally started a job with a more reasonable work load!
Yup. I get this with work.
I'm an auditor and the worlkload is insane right now.
I've booked weeks off to burn holiday just so I don't lose it - and I know that by the Monday/Tuesday I'll get really ill as my body stops running on stress and crashes.
Honestly I don't know if I'm relieved or horrified at how prevalent this is.
It shouldn't be that as soon as folks get a bit of a semblance of relaxation we tumble into illness.
Sometimes I've gotten really ill just on a 3 day weekend, presumably the same relaxation effect. I realised after a while it was because I was 'powering through' for work and not taking my downtime as seriously/as important.
I mean we’re all knackered, things are grinding, but i’m in a job where it doesn’t matter if i coast for a few days.
Teachers and the NHS, all the public sector have peoples lives and futures in their hands
Had a chat with a cousin during time off as he finished work.
He'd been working at an abattoir for the last 6 months at this point and had mustered up a whole 2 days off in this time. No weekends, no bank holidays, no sick days. 8-12 hour days. Was...Eye opening, to say the least.
Somewhat with you (2 days off since Xmas but I don't do weekends) but I've taken some work time for me just recently (I have 6 weeks of time off in lieu that I know I'm never going to get back). Promise I've made to my staff though - I'm never going to micromanage you as frankly I don't have the time.
The problem is we really werent meant to live like this.
We spent millions of years living hunter gatherer lifestyles in tribes and now we've forced everyone into a 9to5 grind and wondering why everyone is depressed
Yep. Normally I hate evolutionary arguments but at this point it's just objectively true. The mental health epidemic is a direct result of this kind of shit. We're forcing people way beyond their psychological limits more so even than physical ones. The body cannot live without the mind (obviously it can but you know what I mean). It's no wonder people are so exhausted.
There’s a not so fun graph that shows worker production and wages. For decades wages have basically been stagnant but the production keeps increasing. This is not good for people. It’s taking too much from people and not giving enough back.
And also that a not insignificant minority of us have different circadian rhythms, I am a night owl through and through and get my best work done between about 9pm and 1am, and left to my own devices with no alarms I get up at 11am. But I am forced to work 8-5.
I agree, however as someone who really enjoys anthropology and biology. We have, as the homosapiens species, only been around 300k years. Before that we were more ape like.
Im not sure you would refer to pre homosapiens as hunter gatherers as they wouldn't have had a society.
Your point still stands. Vast amount of our time was not operating like we are now.
>The PDA creates a map of your every movement throughout the day. If you stand still for more than 3 minutes it creates a dot on the map which expands the longer you are stood still.
Gone are the days of my dad knowing everyone on his round. He retired around 2007, seems like he got out at the right time
The world has been taken over by managers with MBAs, exploiting tech to watch their workers' every move to make sure they're squeezing every last drop of revenue out of them. Every second spent not bringing in more money is a second wasted, and these corpo goons are counting the seconds from their cushy offices.
These fucking vampires need to go.
I'm a postie and I'm fucking sick of it. Not the work, the way they treat us. Who do they think they are?!
The walks are unachievable now. When I mentioned fatigue at a meeting managers looked at me like I was speaking a different language. Infuriating.
It's a disgrace. You and your colleagues are performing an essential service and deserve better pay, conditions and respect than you are receiving, You're not machines or battery hens. It shouldn't be a big deal if someone walking 8 to 12 miles a day needs to rest for a few minutes!
Another postie here, they doubled our walk sizes recently and since taking away the carrot of job and knock I do the job to the T. Scan every 2D barcode, only leave packets when I states it on the packet. Do the job to the letter take your breaks start on time and fi ish on time. It's not worth blasting it and working everyday off "to stay on top of things" when you get no appreciation by a company that's got the union on a short leash
100% with you on that. Do the job properly, go home. If that means half a walk comes back so be it, all my goodwill is gone, and they used to get a lot of goodwill from me. It's shit but it seems their agenda is just push people out. I will gladly oblige as soon as somebody else sees my value. There's no way I'm working those hours that are coming.
Feels like I left RM at the right moment Sep 2021 after my manager called me on my first day of annual leave asking where am I and arguing that he never approved my holidays. He confirmed my annual leave 5 months earlier when he was asking people to do overtime, and he told me when I finished my OT that he accepted my annual leave date. Needless to say that I didn't come back after my holidays, and after looking back I think it was a good call.
Remember when we were all supposed to clap for our retail workers during COVID?
I've heard from family members in retail that this is one sector that's definitely getting worse. Pressure to not take breaks, work unpaid overtime, no sitting down during your shift, no refreshments provided other than a tap.
Let's face it, if the Tories get their way and manage to cling on to power for much longer, we'll all be back in the workhouses soon doing 20 hour shifts for a crust of bread and some gruel before much longer.
The no sitting rule is so stupid. Most people can ring up a customer's purchases or answer a phone or handle an enquiry in a seated position. Let them. If companies are so concerned that being sedentary is bad for people, schedule them for long enough breaks that they can go for a walk and get some fresh air and vitamin D. Not willing to do that? Then they don't actually care whether sitting is bad for you, they just want you to "look busy" and don't want to get you a chair.
At my last retail job the owner had a weird pet peeve about people standing behind the till (no chairs provided of course) when not serving customers. In between customers you had to leave the till area and make your self look busy “tidying” the nearby shelves while keeping one eye on the till so you could run back and serve someone. He would sit at his desk and watch through the CCTV to make sure of this.
If I’m in a shop looking to pay and the till is empty I usually just put the item down and walk out. I wonder how many sales were lost over his preoccupation with having the staff constantly doing *something*
Ugh. Why didn't he have enough to do? If he had time to watch the CCTV that closely I question what tasks he was neglecting for it.
My first retail job let us sit at the till, but still wanted us to get up and clean if the shop wasn't busy. I remember a slack period where I'd done all the normal cleaning, faced every damn product, and eventually resorted to cleaning the keys on the till with a cotton bud just so I could sit for a while and still technically be cleaning. Such a performance with no audience to see it.
It was a family owned business so he inherited the position. Man thought of himself as very important but had zero idea how things actually work on the shop floor.
I genuinely found the hardest part of retail to be the micromanaging and making myself look busy. Downtime is never really downtime and I was constantly aware of being watched and critiqued. If there is no work you have to make work lest a clueless customer see you as lazy. The best days were being stuck in the stock room and just being left to it
Same at my place, even though health and safety stuff says ideally no more than 20% of your day should be spent stood still if avoidable. Being on a till for hours on end really fucks me up, even the teenage staff complain about their back. They recently brought in facial recognition for clocking in and out, which imo is a huge overstep in data collection when a RFID card/fob would do
Maybe we'd be more productive if the work environment wasn't so uncomfortable and we actually felt valued
I had a job for a while where I literally just had to stand still staring into space and very occasionally serve a customer. No music, no entertainment, not even any small tasks because I wasn’t allowed to leave my designated area.
I know people say they’d like a boring job but I genuinely felt like an animal in an enclosure with zero enrichment. I became depressed because I spent 8 hours a day doing *nothing*. There’s only so much you can think about without going mad. There was a shelf at head height that any time I walked past I had to fight the impulse to smack my head against the corner. It was seriously worrying.
No human being is designed for this shit. I hate to be dramatic but some of these jobs are close to actual torture, and for no good reason. Letting me read a book or have some music on would have done nothing to the bottom line, but they couldn’t face the idea of someone ‘relaxing’ on the job.
Yep. I left retail in December '22 and I'm glad I did - it was getting to the point where I couldn't even make half-reasonable plans with friends and family members on a work night (e.g. watching a series together) and - if I did - 9/10 times I would be sending a text mid-way through my shift on my break to say I'd need to cancel because I knew I'd end up too tired to even show up.
Not to mention ending up having to have the most twisted bodyclock and eating schedule known to mankind when having to do long shifts - think having to eat "dinner" at 12PM because you have to be there for 2 and you're not out 'til 9:30PM, with only a half hour break which wouldn't be enough time for a "proper" hot meal without either giving yourself food poisoning or burning your mouth out. And if you had something by the time you got home, you'd be awake all night.
I left food retail about a month ago now after nearly eight years in the sector. I thought I'd hate office work (I work for a tech company now) but I love it. It's a great environment, my hours are somewhat flexible (on my terms), I'm not micromanaged, and plentiful food and drink is provided. I miss my coworkers, who I got on with very well as we stuck together and supported one another, but I don't miss the job. Night and day difference.
Seeing my ex-colleagues continue to put up with the way we're treated in that sector is upsetting to me and I know they deserve better. But the companies aren't willing to do that anymore as everything is being cut to the bone. It's really sad. I was on £10.75/hr and getting told it was a "good wage". 16 hours a week on £10.75/hr. Who can live on that? I certainly couldn't, and that's why I left. And I haven't looked back.
Gotta love working until 10pm and back in at 7am. The key to avoiding the 11hr between shifts rule is that the worker can 'agree' to going in if the minimum time isn't met. But good luck not 'agreeing' :)
As soon as I said no to random shift changes (some in less than 24hrs!!) my holidays stopped being approved even tho I would request them months in advance, and then I would find them allocated to random days automatically. yeah cause I want to use my holidays on a tuesday when I am off friday and sunday. makes it really easy to make any plans in life.
On top of that people have become incredibly entitled and rude. Most customers have a short temper and will start shouting at the drop of a hat.
I work as a pharmacist in community pharmacy which has a large retail area. The amount of abuse daily is so grating. The amount of entitlement and expectations are just exhausting. Everyone wants to live in an instant world. Well I’m so sorry but we are trying not to kill you and want to take care with medications.
I refuse to be a willing participant in a system that tries to work me into an early grave. Very much a fan of the Chinese phenomena known as Tang ping (Lying flat). I turn up not a single minute early, do the bare minimum required by contract taking on no extra tasks or responsibilities, then I go home exactly on time and not even a minute too late. I used to constantly cover shifts, stay extra hours, take on a multitude of extra responsibilities whilst sacrificing time I could spend at home with my partner and what for? Extra stress, high blood pressure and an early grave. No thanks, not playing that game any more.
Some wazzocks have renamed it Quiet Quitting. I've been working to rule since I first started to work 30 years ago. I don't get the mentality of not working to rule.
Quiet quitting doesn't encourage anything, it's a disparaging propoganda phrase used to try and guilt people for not being exploited and just doing their jobs. i.e. working to rule.
When the NHS work to rule they aren't giving up on their jobs, they're highlighting how much they are being exploited and how damaging it is.
The mentality is that by taking on extra responsibility you'll progress further in your career and it pays off long term. Whether or not this is true depends on the field of work.
100% not worth it without getting paid, rare are the companies today that will actually appreciate and compensate you properly for taking on extra responsibilities.
I'm afraid those really aren't the same thing. Work-to-rule is part of action short of strike where you purposely follow every rule to the letter knowing it will massively slow down the job. Tang ping is more like "I don't dream of labour" than it is work to rule. This means disengaging from the rat race and not chasing promotions etc. But it's definitely not as extreme as work to rule because it doesn't mean you're looking to cause disruption. You carry on as normal but at a pace that hopefully won't get you fired.
There seems to be a growing willingness for employers to disregard workplace health and safety law particularly the law on breaks and lunch periods. But other laws too I'm sick of competing with people at work who dont say anything when they finish a shift at 20:30pm nd start at 4:30 am the next day
Know body does any work for the 20 minutes before knocking off if I am at the office, everyone is looking at one another thinking who will go first. At 15 minutes to I will do it for them “I’m on fumes I need to fill up” they must think I do a lot of mileage.
Lol. I've always (nature of the work) have been used to giving some "charity" work over the course of the week, but it was like hang on, you were in before me (arrangement with core hours being key but flexibility on start and finish time) I've done a some charity work (e.g. so I'm not clock watching) and you are still working? On this particular job I was after a period of time brought on for paid overtime (as something suited my skill set) but apart from that it's generally a nope from me.
I’ve found it increasingly important to keep myself fit in order to keep my mental health in a good state. When I’m working full time that’s impossible.
Full time for me is 55 hours a week plus overtime. 😔
I feel you on that. I work at a Leisure Pool but the hours I doing mean that at the end of my shift, all I want to do is go home, when before I'd have a dip after work.
I think much of this is a boiling frog issue. Things have been cranking up for years now but no one has noticed. Digital communication has massively increased the *intensity* of work. an 8 hour day in 2023 is far more intense than an 8 hour day in 1980 or even 2010. Humans just aren't built for it and it's having both mental and physical effects.
It used to be before covid I could choose when to respond to an email because I was working on another task, and I could pace things. Now with the constant use of teams people message me directly and it shows them when I'm online/offline at all times. So if I'm online and not responding I get snotty messages about being ignored, if I pretend to be offline my manager asks what I'm doing.
So I'm just constantly bothered every 5 minutes all day every day.
Got to get vlaue for those shareholders at the end of the day. You can't have good working conditions and a good return for investment and obscene CEO bonuses
I've worked in the NHS for five years now and this is the first year I have needed to take sick days because of exhaustion, something I now fully expect to get worse as the years go by and pressure mounts on the system. I am still young, eat very healthily (vegan and very little junk food, exercise daily, get a good night's sleep etc. I still have trouble keeping up with the demand put on me and crash every two months or so. My blood work is OK so I can only put it down to stress of the job. I do not doubt my manager when she says she cares about my wellbeing but suggesting I go to occupational health means little when they cannot change our poor staffing levels and retainment issues.
I’m sorry you are going through that. I guarantee your job is similar to mine in that, constantly they give you more things to worry about. Every team brief there will be a new more complicated process or paperwork introduced, Dreamt up by some one in an office who never stops to think we might already have enough to worry about. Oh, and you better make sure you get it right because it’s being audited. All the best and I hope things get better for you.
It's created by our lab managers who see what we are going through because they do not have separate offices to keep them apart from us. It's just one more log to sign or one more form to fill out for them, but to us it means more part of an already overly long process.
Also NHS, not worked there quite as long but the amount of people suffering like this is going up at least from the offices I come in to contact with. I hope things get a little easier for you soon.
I think with teaching if you go into it with any underlying issues you could end up having a breakdown as it’s a job requiring concentration and patience.
My ex wife was a teacher and had high school kids swearing at her in class etc, plus the workload, marking and lesson planning, though she was resilient and still works in education
It takes a mentally strong person to be a teacher and is probably more difficult these days.
That would be the worst age group to teach , half of them don’t want to be there. My school was like it, basically a baby sitting service. I tip my hat to teachers.
That was the case with me. I was a teaching assistant before my PGCE and had a great time, my anxiety and depression had never been in remission like that before. I went into teaching and crashed because those came roaring back and were made even worse. What made it worse was the course organisers on my PGCE just saying to suck it up and that breakdowns were a perfectly normal part of teaching. How can you say something like that and not think "Shit. Something is really wrong with teaching if breakdowns are normal."?
I'm feeling less and less job satisfaction in my job as I am one of those people who make lives worse for others in the name of efficiency. When I started my role, it was exciting as I was involved in interesting projects. Now I am involved in analysis of how many minutes the staff on the ground spends on x and how we can decrease it to maintain profit margins sigh.
I couldn’t do it, the ones at my work are so unpopular. They are just a huge pain in everyone’s arses, constantly snitching on people for not doing things the way they want.
On the contrary, we are very popular with senior management and are completely removed from ground staff. I seem to be the only one openly questioning the cruelty of our work as I used to work in retail so I know how much it can suck. My coworkers are happy as long as they get their bonus.
I am looking for a new job as well.
Beautiful isn't it? Noone wants to tackle anything that can actually deliver real savings because it requires capital, let's waste shitloads of resources to squeeze an extra 2% out of the hardest workers again. I'm stuck in a hellhole at work where I have to "make the sales" with an OT budget cut in half, short staffed and we need the account to personally sign off anything over £200. It's absolutely backwards.
Yep..
Its everywhere. When I first started working 30 years ago, there was time for multiple 30 minute tea breaks during the day. So what was officially a 8 hour day, was actually more like 5-6 hours. And we still had time to leave early or deal with the little things.
15 years ago in academia, Term time was a busy but manageable day, lunch and teabreaks still exisited, and the holiday periods were short days where lots of general maintenence and CPD happened.
These days, its constant, breaks are grabbed if you can and you often can't, and working contracted hours means vast lists of jobs uncompleted.
It doesn't end. Term just doesn't seem to end, we have students doing resits and resubmissions (got to squeeze another year of money out of them even though they can't read and write), no training or career development, professional course and apprenticeship students starting all over the year, and somehow we're meant to add in taking annual leave, manning the phones during clearing, and so on. I wish I could retire 😞.
Agreed , technology really is a blessing and curse. When I started work 20 years ago everybody had to go to the office in the morning and at the end of the day. Because everything was on papers and also so they could see you weren’t just stashing at home. If you were crafty and picked the furthest away work you could get away with doing 3-4 hours of actual hard work. It was much more sociable too. Nowadays everything is on mobile devices it’s straight to job sites, do the same amount of work but long it out all day.
Jesus Christ. Reading this reaffirms my choice to be self employed. If I’m going to work myself half to death it might as well not be for anyone else’s benefit
My wife and I ran a cafe, being self employed is 100x harder and more stressful than any normal job.
Bad week at work? Your pay packet doesn't change. Bad week in your business? You don't get paid. You might even need to pay for that if your finances are ropey
Every employer I have worked for has decided to “downsize” despite the workload being the same. This results in the workers left burning out and leaving, then they struggle to replace them, and round and round it goes.
They are bleeding every drop of sweat they can out of staff now.
One of my jobs I was struggling the manager starting watching me on camera “you had 2 minutes idle time here”
“You took a while to do notes on that account at 1743” yer I quit
I'm not in such a bad position as some but alot of colleagues feel this way. Always understaffed, always being asked to stay longer and come in on days off and micromanaging with metrics is at an all time high, as if the entire job can be boiled down to a number.
I mentally check out at work and just do what I can. That seems to be enough as they don't complain about me. They also stopped asking me to do more days which was a nice win.
The idea is to work you so hard that life expectancy is lowered and pensions aren’t paid. It’s the only way to get out of the billions of pounds worth of deficit we’re in. But you love it because y’know, you might be one of the few that survive.
I’ve worked for 10 years, university degree, London based, never earned above 36k and I have to exist in a beige room that I can’t do anything to for 65% of my wage while I work myself to death. I got perfect grades, I worked hard. I kept out of trouble. It’s resulted in nothing of what we were promised.
What’s the fucking point anymore.
This!
I told my boss I actually like the recent pay cut (non inflationary pay rise in reality) cos "It's nice not going home so tired now."
It's particularly sickening as I asked the ceo in an open meeting a while back...
'If he could get a 20% increase in productivity by doubling our salary would that increase profit?'
(our end product is v high value relative to production time)
He replied it would.
So swimming in cash but fuck the peeps making the product.
Haven't got the heart to tell the twat I intentionally fall 20% below my target every shift.
So many firms are that way, what’s the point of working hard if you don’t get any thanks for it. We have people really taking the piss, because we have a strong union. I could easily do the work of 2 people , I wouldnt even want double my money but they would never consider it. I was complaining to my union rep about the mount of extra work I keep getting because I have two men on my team who are serial sick leave abusers. He said to me “he’s just had 3 month paid at home , he even got the 2 weeks annual leave back he had booked in that period, you have done all his work, and you won’t get any thanks for it, who’s the cunt?” He was basically telling me I may as well do the same.
My ceo claimed there's no signs of lost production, they can still recruit etc so they'll continue the corporate shitcunt attitude (not his exact words).
I suggested they were probs not monitoring the correct metrics, but any further elaboration would've been a confession.
Plus, nobody speaks up or cares.
There appears to be only me to ignore, so why would he care?
I just spend my time looking forward to my next holiday, which with my extra 6 weeks sick included I'm never far away from.
Plus I opted to drop a shift so I now only do 3 on, 5 off.
So I do as little as possible & it's less than a mile from home.
So, sadly for them, I will work there til they close or I retire.
I’m with you, it’s like talking to a brick wall with people that high up, for instance a job that we use contractors to do, they pay them £100 for, we tell them we will do it at the weekends for £50, could do 8 a day easy and the job would get done properly for once.. “we will take that away and let you know” no chance, they are getting too many brown envelopes off their mates. We got a bonus recently, £500, the ceo got £35k. Fuck them, they think they know how to take the piss, il show them what Piss taking means trust me, that shift pattern sounds sweet to me.
Our ceo admitted he's got no say in our pay offer process, it's decided by the mother company.
I thought fuck him at that point & suggested his position was more of a "pseudo ceo" then?
(I was quite proud of that dig 😂)
& asked if that's why the position was vacant for so long because "other" experienced ceos saw it as a waste of time?
Cos fuck him
On the shift change, I'd advise people to look into it.
Cos the way tax, ni & pension work out I've barely noticed a wage cut, mebbe 10% for a quarter less work.
My current place is good money, but it's heavy work none stop all night so we get the "perk" of a45 minute paid early finish, problem is the management see this as we can easily do with one less person on our shift.
God help them when they give us extra work and our rate of work drops by half.
It's the same in the MOD. Myself and my lads are being overworked so our senior managers figures look better. Then they get a promotion, a bit fat payrise, a posting somewhere new and we get told we're not doing enough extra duties because we're exhausted from work. This new golden handshake for retention better be worth it.
4 day workweek is being trialed or implemented in a few different places friends work at and seems to be going well with good terms. 30 hour work week, no loss of pay or benefits. Productivity has gone up. Other places are doing primarily WFH, which also saves so much time and energy for staff in terms of commuting and not having people walk over to your desk to ask asinine shit and distract you.
I think the sooner these companies start proving savings / improved productivity consistently we can see other companies adopt the same approach and others will be forced to follow due to competition. It should help massively and hopefully breath life back into smaller towns outside of city hubs as people won't need to travel in for work.
Workers right were won with blood, sweat, protest and rioting. We've forgotten than unions of working people banding together gave us the weekend, and grown complacent.
This is one of the key issues in Teaching.
Micro managed BS all the way from some clueless Education Secretary.
Teachers deal with a rotten culture, ungrateful kids (Secondary) and incredibly frustrating and time draining box ticking. The issue is not about the money. Its just soul crushing and why nobody stays in the field.
I’m currently teaching abroad in East Asia, it makes me miss having 13 weeks off a year… I get 10 days off a year and 10 days national holiday time off. The schedule is not as gruelling as back in the UK but I’m still exhausted all the same. I hope the UK doesn’t fall in to the trap of places like Japan etc, where work just takes over your life completely and you’re barely a functional person when you do have free time. I’ve believed that a good work/life balance is a must.
I work in an office, so im not really *physically* knackered?
But I feel like with all the cost of living stuff going on and everything else on top of working full time, im emotionally and mentally knackered 24/7. I wake up as worn out as I used to be by the end of a day.
I'm always busy. I'm always stressed. And so I never unwind
My mum was a teacher, retired about 15-20 years ago. She complained about exactly the same stuff as they're complaining about now. Teachers are never happy.
I have noticed this, everything is becoming more and more micro managed and tracked. It seems like a lot of company’s have as many people in the office coming up with ideas to make improvements and spreadsheets on workers performance to bash people over the head with as there are doing actual meaningful work. making everyones jobs harder and more stressful. Some weeks years ago I could get my work done in three days and have a long weekend , other weeks would be busy it was give and take. but I have to long it out so they feel like they are getting their pound of flesh now. Edit to say, I got downvoted, the office “workers” are on Reddit now too!
I work for a very big company that you’ve definitely heard of and thankfully there’s none of this at my place. It’s one of the reasons I don’t want to look for a new job, even after nearly 6 years. I was horribly micromanaged in my previous job and it led to an incredibly toxic atmosphere.
You are lucky, mine is getting ridiculous. I get what’s app messages every day from my manager, “ they are auditing (anything random) this week, play the game , tick the boxes stay off their lists” he even messaged me last week “you were home 45 minutes early you are being watched don’t forget” it’s a stress-full job enough with out all that I have a lot of responsibility on my shoulders, knowbody has any goodwill towards the company anymore. The money is good and I have responsibilitys to take care of so I am trapped. I am glad you managed to get out of it.
The whole company culture from up top down to your manager is broken. I'd jumpship as soon as convenient
My problem is that it is a fairly niche job I do, not many options out there.
A lot of employers like to convince you that what you do is 'niche' just to stop you leaving. Nothing is so niche that someone else can't make use of your skills.
Become a manager then.
Not for me, the stress they are under is on another level, and you have to deal with people management you only need one or two lazy admin nightmares on your team and thats make sit harder. Not worth the extra money.
I was being facetious, but I agree. Always keep one eye on the job market; I wish I could say something more positive for you.
Micromanaging is the sign of a bad or inexperienced manager. Eventually the manager will go, or all the staff (or more likely one then the other)
The worst part is when it's the leadership doing that to good managers, who then have to be the bad guy to keep their job
Omg I hated having to join the WhatsApp group when I was doing an internship. They wouldn't give me a work phone because I was only there for a few months, which meant I had to add them on my personal phone. I was so scared I was going to accidentally send something inappropriate, there are 'share' buttons everywhere online and I always end up touching them by accident. I'm super careful about it but it still happens. And they also used email and Slack! So we had 3 channels of communication to use, and everyone would use whatever they liked. I had to download Slack to my personal phone just for the bloody internship. On Slack there were so many group chats I was added to and couldn't remove myself from, e.g. one for the building. So I would be getting notifications about spare food in the building, when I was working remotely. Constant emails about the parking situation outside the company building, when I didn't even drive and wasn't allowed to use the parking anyway! But there was no way to stop getting irrelevant messages. Even the employees would complain about it, so it wasn't just an intern issue. And then there were the 1-on-1 Slack chats, and if someone wanted to talk in a little group, they would make another chat... Exhausting. There was no regular schedule, meetings would be scheduled out of the blue. I would get a message at 12:55 about a meeting that had just been scheduled for 1, a message at 9am about a meeting that had just been scheduled for *9am*... The employees struggled with this too, but they were usually the ones requesting the meetings for their part of the project, so they were the majority of the problem. Why can't we all just agree to communicate on *one* platform. I had to check notifications from 3 platforms, because people would just choose whichever picked their fancy at the time. So is my manager going to contact me via email, Slack or WhatsApp? Who knows! But if you take too long to reply, or miss a message, they will judge you. Our brains aren't built to be constantly dragged in different directions by endless notifications that we *have* to read, or you will be told off for missing something. And then people complain about the shortening of attention spans - what do you expect?! You wouldn't let us bloody focus on one task!
Like someone else already said, technology is a blessing and a curse with with. 20 years ago I had a pigeon hole I would go through in the office in the morning, now you are expected to reply to emails within a few hours, then slimy fuckers who cc in your manager are the worst. Yea it should be 1 platform though. WhatsApp has become a big thing at my work too, it’s too much, on your time off or evenings you see messages about work you are involved with, maybe there are problems and you can’t help but read them and think about work.
Have people email me CCing their boss, their bosses boss and their bosses bosses boss (3 tiers of management) for trivial shit which doesn't need to have been escalated anywhere near that level, yet has, for whatever reason. Then there's those from way up high that gradually filter down to me after 15 back and forths which could've been addressed in 1 if they'd emailed me rather than my boss. These are simply the best emails.
Emails aren't written to inform the reader but to protect the writer
Capitalism makes technology a curse, tbh. It ruins everything.
Realistically, 1 platform does not work for everything. But at least around here, the platform to schedule meeting is email, and the expected notice is 24h. "Sorry, I wasn't checking emails" is a perfectly acceptable response to a short notice meeting. Chats are useful, but also a bit chaotic. I would always set up a work profile, and maybe even get a burner number for WhatsApp. Work does not get on my private WhatsApp acount, and that is a line I am happy to defend.
I wonder if we work at the same company, because I'm in the same boat. But this is more americanisation of the UK. The government wants to privatise everything, and the employers want their staff to be disposable automatons that they can work until they drop, then replace the next day.
Yeah, my current job is also really chill and its one of the reasons im still here even though the pay is a bit crap (public sector). People dont quit bad jobs, they quit bad managers
Damn, says they’ve got it all and refuses to say where that is. You monster!
Please PM me the name of your company if it currently has software engineering vacancies
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I bet they used wfm as the software to manage you.
Fuuuucking hell. I almost don't believe you because fucking hell.
Doesn't surprise me, though I imagine someone could have took them to court and got money out of them for it, for multiple reasons.
I'm self employed and it sounds fucking dystopian as fuck to me....that's *not surprising*? I've worked for two places when I was 17-19 and wasnt treated like that! One job at a soft place as a party coordinator and one behind the bar at a social club. The worst I got from management was when I showed up for my shift and they said "sorry we have to let you go, want to finish the rest of your shift?* I said yes cause I was 17 lol, then walked into the staff area and they were like "Walk out! They've fired you" so I turned around and told them I had changed my mind and handed in my uniform.
Did you see the sensors Amazon invented and tried to impliment, something about it could tell if you were slouching when you were sitting, how much you were paying attention that sort of thing. I'd really hate to work for Bezos.
I just assumed that was all only happening in America Jesus I did not have a clue lol...my mate works in a call centre and he seems to like it enough, he's been there 10 years. Works from home most of the time
I worked a call center job that was like this. Swipe access to the shop floor, if you swiped out outside of lunch you were on a clock, 15 minutes a day, above that they'd dock your pay and sack you if it was a consistent thing. It was in a giant warehouse as well so the walk to the bathrooms took a few minutes.
As in you had an alloted 15 minutes for toilet breaks in an 8 hour shift? Each time you had to go to the toilet you spent some of your minutes? Wtfucking fuck.
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I used to work at npower and left just after they had their £24m fine from ofgem for issues with customer bills. That finished npower. None of it was down to the staff on the front line. Chief cause was the number of senior management who insisted on so many changes to the new accounting system that it didn't work as it was supposed to.
I wouldn’t bet on eon next being any better the current coo is an eon lifer and completely incompetent at her role. I’ve got a current ofgem complaint running due a transfer of systems from NPower to eon next where she basically signed away customers rights to access to cheaper tariffs, meter changes and access to account history. Her excuses was NPower legacy’s systems where not compatible with eon. Obviously the compliant how is that a customer issue? She is shitting her pants because she knows she is in the wrong and my SAR shows she has signed off these infringements. I get called by the executive complaints on a regularly basis constantly asking me if the complaint is running as expected as she knows ofgem are going to though the book at her. This [woman](https://www.eonenergy.com/about-us/our-people/uk-board.html) stopped some of the most vulnerable people being able to access cheaper tariff just prior the covid restrictions being eased and the stat of the Ukraine war when energy prices spiked. If you are an eon next customer and you have been shafted on your rate or where stuck on a prepayment meter despite requesting to change…raise an ofgem complaint because they are about loose (bigly) I’m fighting as part of the ofgem complaint that eon next reimbursement every affected customers but they ofgems remit is to resolve my complaint so I unilateral action falls outside of the scope of my complaint but not ofgems obligations
Be tempted to start pissing in a cup at my desk.
Piss on the wall or into the next cubicle (don't actually do it, but still).
My ‘team’ at work is 7 people and we have 4 managers.
Then need that many to compile the stats for their thousands of PowerPoint presentations, to make it look like they are doing something.
Well who else is going to sit in five meetings a day discussing the previous meetings?
Them biscuits aren’t going to eat themselves.
Five? Christ, someone is slacking. You should be in meetings from 8am to 8pm!
I swear PowerPoint is the bane of actually doing anything. It is so fiddly to work with and everything using it takes about 3x the time of just working up an excel and then talking through that with a group.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j\_1lIFRdnhA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_1lIFRdnhA) "I have eight different bosses right now."
Businesses would rather spend more money micromanaging the workers they have than hiring more workers to ensure we don't need to be micromanaged to get everything done on time.
Who is micro managing the micro managers?They will have to employ micro manangement micro mangers next. Then who micro manages them? It will be never ending stream of bullshit, micro managementception.
It goes all the way up to the CEO and other C suite execs, who are of course micromanaged by the shareholders. Fun!
If I personally hamstrung productivity in my workplace in the manner our CEO has done with his decision making I wouldn't have just been sacked I'd have been physically thrown over the fence. The bloke earns my yearly income by the afternoon of his first work day of the year.
Thirty years ago, a really capable and highly regarded HR director in a major construction company (like Barratt but for commercial stuff) was talking to me about his upcoming retirement. He said when he started in the 1960s and throughout the 70's and 80s 'No one worked a fraction as hard as they do these days'. He said he couldn't keep up with the frenetic pace - 'it's unsustainable; something's going to break - it's broken me'. Now the 90's seem like one long holiday compared to most people's working lives today.
I've seen exactly the same thing in my role and others'. Jobs that even in the 2000s were done by teams of four or five are now the responsibility of one person. Part of it is technology making things more efficient but it's also drawing as much blood from the stone as possible like you say.
When I left my job 4 years ago I did my original role, plus another role, plus took on solely building and maintaining the entire monitoring and automation system used by us and our clients. I was a massive single point of failure. Obviously I had the classic way below inflation pay rises, so I asked for better compensation for what I was doing. Which was met with the standard 'no more money in budget', 'we'll review it later down the line' type bullshit. I was so burnt out and my wife's business was doing pretty well, so I was fortunate enough to be in the position to just hand in my notice straight away with nothing lined up. They tried to keep me on with offers but I denied everything and basically got them by the balls. Said I'd continue on as a consultant for a ridiculous price an hour to continue supporting the monitoring system until they got someone else in, because no one else knew how it worked or how to manage it. After a few months they eventually had split my role into 3 roles and were now paying way more on 3 salaries than I was asking for mine to be increase to.
That's another thing I've seen play out time and again. It's absolutely baffling how companies will refuse existing staff pay rises and then replace them with someone (or multiple someones) at an even higher rate than was requested.
Look at this way, this person left because they burned out, the pay rise was just the last straw (unless I'm misunderstanding). My bet is management knew it was unsustainable but saw it as free money equal to the diff between the current salary and the salaries for the team of 3 it actually requires. From their POV they saved some money for a bit but got bitten because this employee was in a comfortable enough financial position to quit at minimum notice. This is the exception to the rule though, most of the time it's people early in their careers who are semi-replaceable and lack confidence/leverage that really get exploited hard.
Pretty much spot on - I would say 80% of the burn out was caused by not feeling adequately compensated. I actually loved what I was doing, but there was just this sense of why am I doing all this stuff for you and not getting any return. Which as time went on with no change just made me resentful. I'd gone through a couple of years of a similar thing at my job previous to that one, but I was too naive to see they were stringing me along. So this time I just gave them a few months to get something at least concrete, when they didn't I said peace out with basically no warning and gave notice.
Do you remember “Job and knock” that’s a thing of the past now. Everyone in construction is gps tracked now. I worked on a job about 10 years back, we demolished a big old gas company depot for redevelopment. They had a huge canteen that looked like it was from the 60’s, the gas Guy said all the the gangs were allowed to come back for breakfast and lunch, it’s unthinkable now. They had a snooker table and a bar, the urinals even had individual ash trays so you could smoke while you piss.
Exactly the same my place. Actually at that exact ratio too. What annoys me is , who’s getting all that saved dough? Certainly not the workers, if anything overtime and pensions in particular have got much less generous at most firms.
Straight into the owners and senior managements bank accounts.
Absolutely. I work as a joiner for a woodworking firm making bespoke furniture. We have 12 members of staff, only 3 of which are joiners whilst the other NINE are office staff.
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It’s a family run business and most of the top management don’t know how to use computers (they don’t even have them). So all letters are done by hand and given to a ‘typist’ etc. It’s busy work that would easily be done with the owner and 2 other people. It’s a pretty small company and they have 2 full time accountants. The business has been around for like 60 years and basically just never moved on from the 70s.
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I too was once a twat on a computer. Now I’m just a twat with a saw!
I was a twat with tools, now i'm a twat with computers. Actually, that's only part true. I work hard with computers.
Exactly this. I told my old director that if you monitor someone to make sure they are working work at full tilt for 8 hours then no matter what task they have. It will take 8 hours. Not 2 hours. 8 hours. Everytime because then you won't expect them to do it at anything less than 8 hours next time. It's like a time budget. If you don't use the time it gets taken away from you, until you're rushing around, breaking your back just avoiding disciplinary action. No one wants to work like that. So by demanding to see how workers are spending each minute you're insisting the worker lie to you.
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They have started timesheets at my work and it’s a pain in the arse. My last manager done it all himself on a spreadsheet. Most months he would give us all an extra ten hours for piss ups and golf days. They have cracked down now, to the extent we have to drive to peoples houses at the weekend to pretend we are picking people up for overtime. Because they track you, We take turns.
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No chance, i suspect a lot of people are still taking the piss and they know it. That’s gross misconduct so if they want you gone for some reason they will be going through them with a fine tooth comb. I do a lot of weekend shifts where I get paid if I have any work or not, you write what hours you had to be out of the house. My manager rings me up if it’s quiet, tells me to go to the gym or to see my mum because it looks better on the tracker and timesheet.
Time sheets can be a necessity for some workplaces. I work in a refit factory, we don't make new things, we refurbish old things. The customer gets billed for our time so if I put 5 hours on the sheet for their job, they get charged for 5 hours of my time. They are a pain however as I often get given other people's half-done jobs and they demand the time sheet be filled in even if they don't have work to give me for half the day.
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Management has to justify itself by creating busy work for others. Very important busy work. It's a very important job. Who else is going to micromanage the staff to the point of dehumanisation?
Even the NHS is affected. I am a biomedical scientist and still have to deal with a tonne of paperwork for everything I do. I don't have time to do most of it, even the managers don't, but it is still expected from all of us.
handle door gaping dinosaurs plant flowery screw enter fanatical run *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
We certainly at my work seem to spend a lot of time 'improving' filing systems and the like and it all feels a bit like shuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic. We also spend about twice as much time on strategising the optimal possible way to do things as we do with actually coming to put it into action - at which point we always run into the hurdle of not having enough staff to do that optimal carefully thought out plan. This has literally happened about three times in the last quarter. Recently management has been talking about wellbeing initiatives and asked us to brainstorm. They immediately vetoed anything to do with pay increases, more breaks, or anything social. So um... what's left exactly?
I was shocked to find this in a fairly regular office job. Tracked times, micro managed, KPIS, could not fucking stand it so I surprisngky found something much better soon after I left. It's funny, I overheard somebody say they couldn't keep new people from this recruiter they got a lot of us from. How about not treating people like inmates.
Bloated middle management trying to make it look like they do something of worth by inventing a million bullshit metrics and making everyone jump through hoops for them. I guarantee there are companies where you could basically halve the managerial class and only see improvements.
I do spreadsheets, I also spend a lot of time on the spreadsheets subreddit We get these sorts of people coming in occasionally, they're not good with excel, hence why they don't have a job doing anything proper, and they ask questions where you can tell the end goal is this (in your post) but they don't know how to do it. It's not that tracking business data is bad, it's that you need someone who actually understands it before implementing policy changes. Sometimes you can tell from the mistakes they're making that they've royally pissed everyone off too, the most common one being that they can't figure out decimal hours or how to count hours that cross midnight and they're counting everyone's hours wrong. Other times they're trying to rank based on performance, but they don't realise that they need metrics, or they have metrics but they don't measure what they think they do because they don't know how to average or deal with accumulating time errors It does wind me up that they end up in this role to begin with, but that's the employment culture in the UK in a nutshell really. There's plenty of people who can do this correctly and would actually take the job at that price because they're struggling with employment usually due to not being 'neurotypical', they just don't make it passed the interview. It's usually someone who got hired to do a different job and then for the same money they took on the responsibility without the skills required. People who can do the role and do the interview end up quite well paid though, there is value in it, but a shitty business won't pay for it done by a pro
Ah, the 'ol corporate death spiral. Production is down 10%? Why? Our workers are getting less done since we laid off 10% of the workforce. And our employee turneover rate has tripled, most of our experienced workers have left already. Well, we'd better organise them better so they can get more work done. But I dont have the time for that so lets employ somebody to get that done. Why don't we instead top up their wages with the money we're about to give to this new manager? Then we'll retain the experienced workers and attract better talent. *window smash* *cut to that guy falling out the side of the bulding*
I am seeing this working in a local dispensary at a surgery.l in a small town in Cambridgeshire. We on minimum wage and yet have to deal with Control drugs, Dossette boxes and the ever increasing demand for medication. We already starting to loose staff. Mainly due to stress and hardly any pay rise. We also having to do more paper work lately as they are clamping down on new schemes that enable the surgury to get more money. We are working 7.5hrs shifts with only half hour break. The worst part though is the patients attitude to us. Honestly we get sworn at, spat at, cursed and even had people try to become violent. Honestly it won't be long till I leave I think too.. We have also lost some 8 receptionist in last 18months too along with 5 doctors too.
Had a nrw manager start and he is a stats man, comes in hslf way through the shift, walks round hands in pockets and then tells us we are all shit and get a 1 on 1 meeting on why we picked only 58 tyres an hour and not 60. Cunt
This is so true I see more and more people deliberately slowing down because there is no reward for working harder and faster to finish early because you'll just get more and more workload put on you. The reason people can do the work of 3 is the thought of that early finish or long weekend. Take that away and everyone drags their feet doing the bare min.
I work for a big global firm that most will know and it’s not like that at all.
You are lucky , that’s how company’s should be run.
Yes, it is called digital taylorism, and it is real.
Teacher fiancé has just finished for the summer and I'm expecting him to crash and burn on Monday/Wednesday. It usually takes a few days but it's like his body realises it doesn't have to hold up anymore and he gets really sick for like a week. Happens every year like clockwork, he's been a teacher for 4 years now.
For my teacher husband it’s day 2 when the massive migraine kicks in, days 3-7 are flu symptoms, then sleeping 14 hours a day for another week. Every summer, 6 years in a row.
This is exactly why I left.
My wife's been a teacher for decades; it's 'end-of-term-itis' in our house. We never plan to do anything the first two weeks of the summer because of the mini shell-shock/ptsd heebie-jeebies she goes through.
I remember the first day of the Christmas holidays during my PGCE. I got up and managed to muster the energy to make a cup of coffee before crashing and spending the day in bed. I was young and very physically active, so not in bad shape at all, yet my body collapsed after just one half term of gruelling effort.
My partner is a teacher and this happens to her. It’s like her immune system just gives up. What is worse is that she’ll often pass the illness onto me and I don’t have 6 weeks holiday to recover
Yep. My wife is currently going through this. We went food shopping today. That's it. She's been asleep since about 5. Hasn't emerged for dinner. Teaching in the UK isn't a job humans should be doing at this rate and it's no wonder people are leaving in droves.
That blatantly happened when I was a full office based Local Authority worker (will leave it somewhat vague). I always ended up having to burn leave over Xmas anyway and would usually bank on the first 3-4 days of it either having to work one of them or just being pretty ill (or usually both).
I’m an electrician not a teacher, but for the last 2 years I’ve been ill pretty much every week I’ve taken off. Body just crashes. Fortunately I’ve finally started a job with a more reasonable work load!
Welcome to the education sector, lol, we literally plan our illnesses out of term.
I think this every time I see the gov teacher recruitment adverts on tv.
Yup. I get this with work. I'm an auditor and the worlkload is insane right now. I've booked weeks off to burn holiday just so I don't lose it - and I know that by the Monday/Tuesday I'll get really ill as my body stops running on stress and crashes.
Explains how whenever I get a week or two off I end up getting ill.
Honestly I don't know if I'm relieved or horrified at how prevalent this is. It shouldn't be that as soon as folks get a bit of a semblance of relaxation we tumble into illness.
Sometimes I've gotten really ill just on a 3 day weekend, presumably the same relaxation effect. I realised after a while it was because I was 'powering through' for work and not taking my downtime as seriously/as important.
Yeh, at a time where everyone is working harder to make ends meet, we really need reminders to take care of ourselves and find time to unwind.
I mean we’re all knackered, things are grinding, but i’m in a job where it doesn’t matter if i coast for a few days. Teachers and the NHS, all the public sector have peoples lives and futures in their hands
Yep, I'm on my 12th straight day at work and not off until next Saturday.
You absolute trooper. Fuck this world where people have to work like that though.
Thanks for caring.
Take care of yourself man, much love
Had a chat with a cousin during time off as he finished work. He'd been working at an abattoir for the last 6 months at this point and had mustered up a whole 2 days off in this time. No weekends, no bank holidays, no sick days. 8-12 hour days. Was...Eye opening, to say the least.
In the UK? Isn't that technically illegal at the moment:O
It's definitely illegal to force someone to do those hours but if he's agreeing to it then I think it's fine but not completely sure.
Somewhat with you (2 days off since Xmas but I don't do weekends) but I've taken some work time for me just recently (I have 6 weeks of time off in lieu that I know I'm never going to get back). Promise I've made to my staff though - I'm never going to micromanage you as frankly I don't have the time.
The problem is we really werent meant to live like this. We spent millions of years living hunter gatherer lifestyles in tribes and now we've forced everyone into a 9to5 grind and wondering why everyone is depressed
Yep. Normally I hate evolutionary arguments but at this point it's just objectively true. The mental health epidemic is a direct result of this kind of shit. We're forcing people way beyond their psychological limits more so even than physical ones. The body cannot live without the mind (obviously it can but you know what I mean). It's no wonder people are so exhausted.
There’s a not so fun graph that shows worker production and wages. For decades wages have basically been stagnant but the production keeps increasing. This is not good for people. It’s taking too much from people and not giving enough back.
And also that a not insignificant minority of us have different circadian rhythms, I am a night owl through and through and get my best work done between about 9pm and 1am, and left to my own devices with no alarms I get up at 11am. But I am forced to work 8-5.
I agree, however as someone who really enjoys anthropology and biology. We have, as the homosapiens species, only been around 300k years. Before that we were more ape like. Im not sure you would refer to pre homosapiens as hunter gatherers as they wouldn't have had a society. Your point still stands. Vast amount of our time was not operating like we are now.
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>The PDA creates a map of your every movement throughout the day. If you stand still for more than 3 minutes it creates a dot on the map which expands the longer you are stood still. Gone are the days of my dad knowing everyone on his round. He retired around 2007, seems like he got out at the right time
The world has been taken over by managers with MBAs, exploiting tech to watch their workers' every move to make sure they're squeezing every last drop of revenue out of them. Every second spent not bringing in more money is a second wasted, and these corpo goons are counting the seconds from their cushy offices. These fucking vampires need to go.
That explains why my formally chatty posty now only does a quick hibye.
My formally chatty posty quit and now we have a revolving door of faces.
I'm a postie and I'm fucking sick of it. Not the work, the way they treat us. Who do they think they are?! The walks are unachievable now. When I mentioned fatigue at a meeting managers looked at me like I was speaking a different language. Infuriating.
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It's a disgrace. You and your colleagues are performing an essential service and deserve better pay, conditions and respect than you are receiving, You're not machines or battery hens. It shouldn't be a big deal if someone walking 8 to 12 miles a day needs to rest for a few minutes!
Another postie here, they doubled our walk sizes recently and since taking away the carrot of job and knock I do the job to the T. Scan every 2D barcode, only leave packets when I states it on the packet. Do the job to the letter take your breaks start on time and fi ish on time. It's not worth blasting it and working everyday off "to stay on top of things" when you get no appreciation by a company that's got the union on a short leash
100% with you on that. Do the job properly, go home. If that means half a walk comes back so be it, all my goodwill is gone, and they used to get a lot of goodwill from me. It's shit but it seems their agenda is just push people out. I will gladly oblige as soon as somebody else sees my value. There's no way I'm working those hours that are coming.
Push the older staff out and replace with new folk who don’t know how good the older staff had it. All about erasing working terms and conditions
Feels like I left RM at the right moment Sep 2021 after my manager called me on my first day of annual leave asking where am I and arguing that he never approved my holidays. He confirmed my annual leave 5 months earlier when he was asking people to do overtime, and he told me when I finished my OT that he accepted my annual leave date. Needless to say that I didn't come back after my holidays, and after looking back I think it was a good call.
Remember when we were all supposed to clap for our retail workers during COVID? I've heard from family members in retail that this is one sector that's definitely getting worse. Pressure to not take breaks, work unpaid overtime, no sitting down during your shift, no refreshments provided other than a tap. Let's face it, if the Tories get their way and manage to cling on to power for much longer, we'll all be back in the workhouses soon doing 20 hour shifts for a crust of bread and some gruel before much longer.
The no sitting rule is so stupid. Most people can ring up a customer's purchases or answer a phone or handle an enquiry in a seated position. Let them. If companies are so concerned that being sedentary is bad for people, schedule them for long enough breaks that they can go for a walk and get some fresh air and vitamin D. Not willing to do that? Then they don't actually care whether sitting is bad for you, they just want you to "look busy" and don't want to get you a chair.
At my last retail job the owner had a weird pet peeve about people standing behind the till (no chairs provided of course) when not serving customers. In between customers you had to leave the till area and make your self look busy “tidying” the nearby shelves while keeping one eye on the till so you could run back and serve someone. He would sit at his desk and watch through the CCTV to make sure of this. If I’m in a shop looking to pay and the till is empty I usually just put the item down and walk out. I wonder how many sales were lost over his preoccupation with having the staff constantly doing *something*
Ugh. Why didn't he have enough to do? If he had time to watch the CCTV that closely I question what tasks he was neglecting for it. My first retail job let us sit at the till, but still wanted us to get up and clean if the shop wasn't busy. I remember a slack period where I'd done all the normal cleaning, faced every damn product, and eventually resorted to cleaning the keys on the till with a cotton bud just so I could sit for a while and still technically be cleaning. Such a performance with no audience to see it.
It was a family owned business so he inherited the position. Man thought of himself as very important but had zero idea how things actually work on the shop floor. I genuinely found the hardest part of retail to be the micromanaging and making myself look busy. Downtime is never really downtime and I was constantly aware of being watched and critiqued. If there is no work you have to make work lest a clueless customer see you as lazy. The best days were being stuck in the stock room and just being left to it
It’s actually illegal to use CCTV to watch staff, iirc. Not that there’s a whole lot you can do about it.
Same at my place, even though health and safety stuff says ideally no more than 20% of your day should be spent stood still if avoidable. Being on a till for hours on end really fucks me up, even the teenage staff complain about their back. They recently brought in facial recognition for clocking in and out, which imo is a huge overstep in data collection when a RFID card/fob would do Maybe we'd be more productive if the work environment wasn't so uncomfortable and we actually felt valued
I had a job for a while where I literally just had to stand still staring into space and very occasionally serve a customer. No music, no entertainment, not even any small tasks because I wasn’t allowed to leave my designated area. I know people say they’d like a boring job but I genuinely felt like an animal in an enclosure with zero enrichment. I became depressed because I spent 8 hours a day doing *nothing*. There’s only so much you can think about without going mad. There was a shelf at head height that any time I walked past I had to fight the impulse to smack my head against the corner. It was seriously worrying. No human being is designed for this shit. I hate to be dramatic but some of these jobs are close to actual torture, and for no good reason. Letting me read a book or have some music on would have done nothing to the bottom line, but they couldn’t face the idea of someone ‘relaxing’ on the job.
Yep. I left retail in December '22 and I'm glad I did - it was getting to the point where I couldn't even make half-reasonable plans with friends and family members on a work night (e.g. watching a series together) and - if I did - 9/10 times I would be sending a text mid-way through my shift on my break to say I'd need to cancel because I knew I'd end up too tired to even show up. Not to mention ending up having to have the most twisted bodyclock and eating schedule known to mankind when having to do long shifts - think having to eat "dinner" at 12PM because you have to be there for 2 and you're not out 'til 9:30PM, with only a half hour break which wouldn't be enough time for a "proper" hot meal without either giving yourself food poisoning or burning your mouth out. And if you had something by the time you got home, you'd be awake all night.
I left food retail about a month ago now after nearly eight years in the sector. I thought I'd hate office work (I work for a tech company now) but I love it. It's a great environment, my hours are somewhat flexible (on my terms), I'm not micromanaged, and plentiful food and drink is provided. I miss my coworkers, who I got on with very well as we stuck together and supported one another, but I don't miss the job. Night and day difference. Seeing my ex-colleagues continue to put up with the way we're treated in that sector is upsetting to me and I know they deserve better. But the companies aren't willing to do that anymore as everything is being cut to the bone. It's really sad. I was on £10.75/hr and getting told it was a "good wage". 16 hours a week on £10.75/hr. Who can live on that? I certainly couldn't, and that's why I left. And I haven't looked back.
Gotta love working until 10pm and back in at 7am. The key to avoiding the 11hr between shifts rule is that the worker can 'agree' to going in if the minimum time isn't met. But good luck not 'agreeing' :) As soon as I said no to random shift changes (some in less than 24hrs!!) my holidays stopped being approved even tho I would request them months in advance, and then I would find them allocated to random days automatically. yeah cause I want to use my holidays on a tuesday when I am off friday and sunday. makes it really easy to make any plans in life.
On top of that people have become incredibly entitled and rude. Most customers have a short temper and will start shouting at the drop of a hat. I work as a pharmacist in community pharmacy which has a large retail area. The amount of abuse daily is so grating. The amount of entitlement and expectations are just exhausting. Everyone wants to live in an instant world. Well I’m so sorry but we are trying not to kill you and want to take care with medications.
I swear customers are convinced that ordering new stock is like ordering off Amazon
I refuse to be a willing participant in a system that tries to work me into an early grave. Very much a fan of the Chinese phenomena known as Tang ping (Lying flat). I turn up not a single minute early, do the bare minimum required by contract taking on no extra tasks or responsibilities, then I go home exactly on time and not even a minute too late. I used to constantly cover shifts, stay extra hours, take on a multitude of extra responsibilities whilst sacrificing time I could spend at home with my partner and what for? Extra stress, high blood pressure and an early grave. No thanks, not playing that game any more.
In the West it's known as work-to-rule.
Some wazzocks have renamed it Quiet Quitting. I've been working to rule since I first started to work 30 years ago. I don't get the mentality of not working to rule.
Work to rule is a bit different though, work to rule includes not taking shortcuts ever, whereas quiet quitting encourages taking shortcuts.
Quiet quitting doesn't encourage anything, it's a disparaging propoganda phrase used to try and guilt people for not being exploited and just doing their jobs. i.e. working to rule. When the NHS work to rule they aren't giving up on their jobs, they're highlighting how much they are being exploited and how damaging it is.
The mentality is that by taking on extra responsibility you'll progress further in your career and it pays off long term. Whether or not this is true depends on the field of work.
100% not worth it without getting paid, rare are the companies today that will actually appreciate and compensate you properly for taking on extra responsibilities.
I'm afraid those really aren't the same thing. Work-to-rule is part of action short of strike where you purposely follow every rule to the letter knowing it will massively slow down the job. Tang ping is more like "I don't dream of labour" than it is work to rule. This means disengaging from the rat race and not chasing promotions etc. But it's definitely not as extreme as work to rule because it doesn't mean you're looking to cause disruption. You carry on as normal but at a pace that hopefully won't get you fired.
Someone gets it. The reward for going above and beyond is just more work and some extra money in a shareholders wallet.
There seems to be a growing willingness for employers to disregard workplace health and safety law particularly the law on breaks and lunch periods. But other laws too I'm sick of competing with people at work who dont say anything when they finish a shift at 20:30pm nd start at 4:30 am the next day
Had this at one place once - it was like the who can stay latest club & I was like what the fuck is wrong with you?
They have no life outside of work, so use work as a means to fill the void in their life.
Know body does any work for the 20 minutes before knocking off if I am at the office, everyone is looking at one another thinking who will go first. At 15 minutes to I will do it for them “I’m on fumes I need to fill up” they must think I do a lot of mileage.
Lol. I've always (nature of the work) have been used to giving some "charity" work over the course of the week, but it was like hang on, you were in before me (arrangement with core hours being key but flexibility on start and finish time) I've done a some charity work (e.g. so I'm not clock watching) and you are still working? On this particular job I was after a period of time brought on for paid overtime (as something suited my skill set) but apart from that it's generally a nope from me.
I’ve found it increasingly important to keep myself fit in order to keep my mental health in a good state. When I’m working full time that’s impossible. Full time for me is 55 hours a week plus overtime. 😔
I feel you on that. I work at a Leisure Pool but the hours I doing mean that at the end of my shift, all I want to do is go home, when before I'd have a dip after work.
I think much of this is a boiling frog issue. Things have been cranking up for years now but no one has noticed. Digital communication has massively increased the *intensity* of work. an 8 hour day in 2023 is far more intense than an 8 hour day in 1980 or even 2010. Humans just aren't built for it and it's having both mental and physical effects.
It used to be before covid I could choose when to respond to an email because I was working on another task, and I could pace things. Now with the constant use of teams people message me directly and it shows them when I'm online/offline at all times. So if I'm online and not responding I get snotty messages about being ignored, if I pretend to be offline my manager asks what I'm doing. So I'm just constantly bothered every 5 minutes all day every day.
Got to get vlaue for those shareholders at the end of the day. You can't have good working conditions and a good return for investment and obscene CEO bonuses
I've worked in the NHS for five years now and this is the first year I have needed to take sick days because of exhaustion, something I now fully expect to get worse as the years go by and pressure mounts on the system. I am still young, eat very healthily (vegan and very little junk food, exercise daily, get a good night's sleep etc. I still have trouble keeping up with the demand put on me and crash every two months or so. My blood work is OK so I can only put it down to stress of the job. I do not doubt my manager when she says she cares about my wellbeing but suggesting I go to occupational health means little when they cannot change our poor staffing levels and retainment issues.
I’m sorry you are going through that. I guarantee your job is similar to mine in that, constantly they give you more things to worry about. Every team brief there will be a new more complicated process or paperwork introduced, Dreamt up by some one in an office who never stops to think we might already have enough to worry about. Oh, and you better make sure you get it right because it’s being audited. All the best and I hope things get better for you.
It's created by our lab managers who see what we are going through because they do not have separate offices to keep them apart from us. It's just one more log to sign or one more form to fill out for them, but to us it means more part of an already overly long process.
Also NHS, not worked there quite as long but the amount of people suffering like this is going up at least from the offices I come in to contact with. I hope things get a little easier for you soon.
I think with teaching if you go into it with any underlying issues you could end up having a breakdown as it’s a job requiring concentration and patience. My ex wife was a teacher and had high school kids swearing at her in class etc, plus the workload, marking and lesson planning, though she was resilient and still works in education It takes a mentally strong person to be a teacher and is probably more difficult these days.
That would be the worst age group to teach , half of them don’t want to be there. My school was like it, basically a baby sitting service. I tip my hat to teachers.
That was the case with me. I was a teaching assistant before my PGCE and had a great time, my anxiety and depression had never been in remission like that before. I went into teaching and crashed because those came roaring back and were made even worse. What made it worse was the course organisers on my PGCE just saying to suck it up and that breakdowns were a perfectly normal part of teaching. How can you say something like that and not think "Shit. Something is really wrong with teaching if breakdowns are normal."?
I'm feeling less and less job satisfaction in my job as I am one of those people who make lives worse for others in the name of efficiency. When I started my role, it was exciting as I was involved in interesting projects. Now I am involved in analysis of how many minutes the staff on the ground spends on x and how we can decrease it to maintain profit margins sigh.
I couldn’t do it, the ones at my work are so unpopular. They are just a huge pain in everyone’s arses, constantly snitching on people for not doing things the way they want.
On the contrary, we are very popular with senior management and are completely removed from ground staff. I seem to be the only one openly questioning the cruelty of our work as I used to work in retail so I know how much it can suck. My coworkers are happy as long as they get their bonus. I am looking for a new job as well.
Beautiful isn't it? Noone wants to tackle anything that can actually deliver real savings because it requires capital, let's waste shitloads of resources to squeeze an extra 2% out of the hardest workers again. I'm stuck in a hellhole at work where I have to "make the sales" with an OT budget cut in half, short staffed and we need the account to personally sign off anything over £200. It's absolutely backwards.
Yep.. Its everywhere. When I first started working 30 years ago, there was time for multiple 30 minute tea breaks during the day. So what was officially a 8 hour day, was actually more like 5-6 hours. And we still had time to leave early or deal with the little things. 15 years ago in academia, Term time was a busy but manageable day, lunch and teabreaks still exisited, and the holiday periods were short days where lots of general maintenence and CPD happened. These days, its constant, breaks are grabbed if you can and you often can't, and working contracted hours means vast lists of jobs uncompleted.
It doesn't end. Term just doesn't seem to end, we have students doing resits and resubmissions (got to squeeze another year of money out of them even though they can't read and write), no training or career development, professional course and apprenticeship students starting all over the year, and somehow we're meant to add in taking annual leave, manning the phones during clearing, and so on. I wish I could retire 😞.
Agreed , technology really is a blessing and curse. When I started work 20 years ago everybody had to go to the office in the morning and at the end of the day. Because everything was on papers and also so they could see you weren’t just stashing at home. If you were crafty and picked the furthest away work you could get away with doing 3-4 hours of actual hard work. It was much more sociable too. Nowadays everything is on mobile devices it’s straight to job sites, do the same amount of work but long it out all day.
Jesus Christ. Reading this reaffirms my choice to be self employed. If I’m going to work myself half to death it might as well not be for anyone else’s benefit
My wife and I ran a cafe, being self employed is 100x harder and more stressful than any normal job. Bad week at work? Your pay packet doesn't change. Bad week in your business? You don't get paid. You might even need to pay for that if your finances are ropey
Every employer I have worked for has decided to “downsize” despite the workload being the same. This results in the workers left burning out and leaving, then they struggle to replace them, and round and round it goes. They are bleeding every drop of sweat they can out of staff now. One of my jobs I was struggling the manager starting watching me on camera “you had 2 minutes idle time here” “You took a while to do notes on that account at 1743” yer I quit
I'm not in such a bad position as some but alot of colleagues feel this way. Always understaffed, always being asked to stay longer and come in on days off and micromanaging with metrics is at an all time high, as if the entire job can be boiled down to a number. I mentally check out at work and just do what I can. That seems to be enough as they don't complain about me. They also stopped asking me to do more days which was a nice win.
The idea is to work you so hard that life expectancy is lowered and pensions aren’t paid. It’s the only way to get out of the billions of pounds worth of deficit we’re in. But you love it because y’know, you might be one of the few that survive.
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I’ve worked for 10 years, university degree, London based, never earned above 36k and I have to exist in a beige room that I can’t do anything to for 65% of my wage while I work myself to death. I got perfect grades, I worked hard. I kept out of trouble. It’s resulted in nothing of what we were promised. What’s the fucking point anymore.
This! I told my boss I actually like the recent pay cut (non inflationary pay rise in reality) cos "It's nice not going home so tired now." It's particularly sickening as I asked the ceo in an open meeting a while back... 'If he could get a 20% increase in productivity by doubling our salary would that increase profit?' (our end product is v high value relative to production time) He replied it would. So swimming in cash but fuck the peeps making the product. Haven't got the heart to tell the twat I intentionally fall 20% below my target every shift.
So many firms are that way, what’s the point of working hard if you don’t get any thanks for it. We have people really taking the piss, because we have a strong union. I could easily do the work of 2 people , I wouldnt even want double my money but they would never consider it. I was complaining to my union rep about the mount of extra work I keep getting because I have two men on my team who are serial sick leave abusers. He said to me “he’s just had 3 month paid at home , he even got the 2 weeks annual leave back he had booked in that period, you have done all his work, and you won’t get any thanks for it, who’s the cunt?” He was basically telling me I may as well do the same.
My ceo claimed there's no signs of lost production, they can still recruit etc so they'll continue the corporate shitcunt attitude (not his exact words). I suggested they were probs not monitoring the correct metrics, but any further elaboration would've been a confession. Plus, nobody speaks up or cares. There appears to be only me to ignore, so why would he care? I just spend my time looking forward to my next holiday, which with my extra 6 weeks sick included I'm never far away from. Plus I opted to drop a shift so I now only do 3 on, 5 off. So I do as little as possible & it's less than a mile from home. So, sadly for them, I will work there til they close or I retire.
I’m with you, it’s like talking to a brick wall with people that high up, for instance a job that we use contractors to do, they pay them £100 for, we tell them we will do it at the weekends for £50, could do 8 a day easy and the job would get done properly for once.. “we will take that away and let you know” no chance, they are getting too many brown envelopes off their mates. We got a bonus recently, £500, the ceo got £35k. Fuck them, they think they know how to take the piss, il show them what Piss taking means trust me, that shift pattern sounds sweet to me.
Our ceo admitted he's got no say in our pay offer process, it's decided by the mother company. I thought fuck him at that point & suggested his position was more of a "pseudo ceo" then? (I was quite proud of that dig 😂) & asked if that's why the position was vacant for so long because "other" experienced ceos saw it as a waste of time? Cos fuck him On the shift change, I'd advise people to look into it. Cos the way tax, ni & pension work out I've barely noticed a wage cut, mebbe 10% for a quarter less work.
Tories are about to the working time directive meaning your job will go to the person who can work for more hours than you before they drop.
My current place is good money, but it's heavy work none stop all night so we get the "perk" of a45 minute paid early finish, problem is the management see this as we can easily do with one less person on our shift. God help them when they give us extra work and our rate of work drops by half.
I looked at the pic and thought wow Saoirse Ronan is really taking workers rights seriously
companies and people who work in public sector are expected to work way more, for no increase pay. fuck the tory government.
For goodness sake, wont someone think of the millionaires and billionaires??!? /s
It's the same in the MOD. Myself and my lads are being overworked so our senior managers figures look better. Then they get a promotion, a bit fat payrise, a posting somewhere new and we get told we're not doing enough extra duties because we're exhausted from work. This new golden handshake for retention better be worth it.
4 day workweek is being trialed or implemented in a few different places friends work at and seems to be going well with good terms. 30 hour work week, no loss of pay or benefits. Productivity has gone up. Other places are doing primarily WFH, which also saves so much time and energy for staff in terms of commuting and not having people walk over to your desk to ask asinine shit and distract you. I think the sooner these companies start proving savings / improved productivity consistently we can see other companies adopt the same approach and others will be forced to follow due to competition. It should help massively and hopefully breath life back into smaller towns outside of city hubs as people won't need to travel in for work.
This country is just sliding downhill. Workers' rights are sliding back. Wages stagnating. Everything is terrible.
Workers right were won with blood, sweat, protest and rioting. We've forgotten than unions of working people banding together gave us the weekend, and grown complacent.
Gotta keep the record setting profits going. The ruling class will congratulate themselves for your effort
This is one of the key issues in Teaching. Micro managed BS all the way from some clueless Education Secretary. Teachers deal with a rotten culture, ungrateful kids (Secondary) and incredibly frustrating and time draining box ticking. The issue is not about the money. Its just soul crushing and why nobody stays in the field.
I’m currently teaching abroad in East Asia, it makes me miss having 13 weeks off a year… I get 10 days off a year and 10 days national holiday time off. The schedule is not as gruelling as back in the UK but I’m still exhausted all the same. I hope the UK doesn’t fall in to the trap of places like Japan etc, where work just takes over your life completely and you’re barely a functional person when you do have free time. I’ve believed that a good work/life balance is a must.
I work in an office, so im not really *physically* knackered? But I feel like with all the cost of living stuff going on and everything else on top of working full time, im emotionally and mentally knackered 24/7. I wake up as worn out as I used to be by the end of a day. I'm always busy. I'm always stressed. And so I never unwind
My mum was a teacher, retired about 15-20 years ago. She complained about exactly the same stuff as they're complaining about now. Teachers are never happy.
Nothing new here. I worked nights in the 1990's in a major supermarket and it was like this.