[Macros]

at Sombra and everyone else who works OT regularly.

if OT happens daily/weekly all the time, its not over time, its short staffing. sure you tell yourself the extra money is handy, but its killing you and the bosses won't give a fuck if you drop at your post. just flat out refuse it and they will have to increase staffing levels, simples.

this took me A LONG time to learn

[Mezla PigDog]

Macros, on 07 January 2022 - 07:28 PM, said:

at Sombra and everyone else who works OT regularly.

if OT happens daily/weekly all the time, its not over time, its short staffing. sure you tell yourself the extra money is handy, but its killing you and the bosses won't give a fuck if you drop at your post. just flat out refuse it and they will have to increase staffing levels, simples.

this took me A LONG time to learn

Oh Mac, it's not even paid OT or time that managers even notice! It's just work that needs doing. Everyone knows we're understaffed. It's on me to solve that problem as well as all the ones created by everyone being spread too thin.

Saying that, I am paid well so a few hours here and there are fine. It's when it becomes the norm and a lot more than 'a few'.

[Macros]

It's still the mindset Mez, I used to do the same, take drawings home with me or do an hour or two on the laptop chasing orders etc back at digs when on a big project, the logic being "sure I'm away sitting in a hotel anyway, may as well keep things ticking over"

It doesn't help the longer you do it and they keep getting away with understaffing the more it becomes expected of you. It's a really tough mindset to break out of, I know believe me, but once you stop doing anything outside of your designated working hours, you'll wonder why you ever did it.

And if everyone knows your understaffed, are your employer's doing anything to rectify, are they advertising? If not then they're taking the piss knowing you guys will pick up the slack and they'll bumble on, don't feed the cycle! Stick it to the man!

[Tsundoku]

@Mez and Maccy

Yeah I know what's going on, but unfortunately in my job when mistakes are made shit rolls downhill.
They don't get in trouble for insufficient staffing, I just cop it for not getting it done. The work has to be done, I'm the only one available. It's that simple.
Plenty of people have been telling me to let it die so that something gets done but I'm the one who gets the blame because higher ups have been enabled all their careers. This isn't civilian land unfortunately.

I don't get OT either, I'm salaried. So yes, there's no incentive to do the OT, just me making sure I don't get booted for being "unsuitable".

They knew this would be a problem months ago and did nothing. Similar thing happened last year, but at least last year there were 2 of us left when the other 2 went elsewhere.

[Macros]

Take it higher
Talk to your local politicians, if you still work where you used to its tax money running the ship

[Mezla PigDog]

In my situation I totally agree Mac. It's self defeating. I manage a team of 20 and I tell them exactly that but then don't do it myself. I'm going to try and get it under control. Problem is our Talent Acquisition team all quit so I'm screening CVs myself.

Are other peoples workplaces experiencing The Great Resignation? Where have all the employees gone? I assumed people would be moving around but none of them are moving our way 🤔

[HoosierDaddy]

I resigned at my last role as a general manager because we couldn't hire anyone Mez. I wasn't going to be held hostage to my store if someone (and they almost always did) decided they didn't want to work 5 minutes before they were supposed to and I was done doing 14 hour days with no overtime pay.

The work shortage is for real. Largely pay and skills limited, but it's massive.

[Aptorian]

Well, since we're bemoaning our workplaces.

My employer, a certain municipal library chain in a Scandinavian capital, would be experiencing mass walk outs if it wasn't for the fact that there's nowhere to go. At least not at the public libraries. There's far more librarians then there are jobs and what jobs there are, are being downsized and replaced by unqualified but cheap labor.

Our municipality is the biggest in the country, yet our municipality is also at bottom of the list of most money spent on libraries per inhabitant.

The library I work at had 10 librarians + office staff to handle paperwork ten years ago. Now there's 5 of us and no office workers, that's centralized. Of the five, two of us, myself included spends more time managing the house, than doing Library work.

I'm leaving for a new position in a month. There won't be a replacement. Another librarian is retiring come May, there's unlikely to be replacement there either, more likely a librarian from a different library will have to cover some of our service hours.

All handling of materials is being reduced to a small team of non-librarian work staff, with shorter hours and less professional qualification. Because there're fewer people to do the work, we've thrown out a quarter of all library materials at the sattelite libraries. Another quarter is being moved to a big off-site sorting and storage facility.

The libraries will be more empty and more uniform. All libraries will have the same small team planing and designing the interiors. No unique displays or events, everything is planned at the head library and rotates on a yearly cycle. Basically we're becoming the McDonald's of libraries.

All the while from up top we keep hearing mantras about focusing on our core job assignment. Better service, more focus on encouraging reading, educating people, blah, blah, blah.

This post has been edited by Aptorian: 08 January 2022 - 07:43 PM

[amphibian]

The part I find most interesting about The Great Resignation is that the people doing the leaving are mostly the 30-55 year olds and the leaving is 20% higher than it was in 2019 (before pandemic).

If we look at who is doing the leaving, it's mostly people who have childcare or adult care to provide and people who are so burnt out by doing more work than they can handle for months and years on end with little institutional support.

I am one of the latter. I burnt out so severely at my non profit attorney job that I couldn't do it anymore. I couldn't continue to handle a triple the regular caseload pace that regularly featured clients in nursing homes and prisons who even with my assistance couldn't get out, couldn't get care, and couldn't get the support they needed to at least not play craps with Death/COVID.

My therapist says it was/is hell and I handled it for about 13 months before flaming the fuck out. I was fired and the organization continues to pile the cases on the attorneys and other workers there. A regular case load prior to COVID was about 12 for me. By the end, I was at 42. Other similar organizations tended to give their attorneys 4-5 cases to handle at any given time.

That's why I mentioned the physical stuff that takes my mind off what is happening at work. The stress was considerable and it has taken me most of 2021 to recover and start looking for work again.

It is a blessing that people are seeing that this is a problem before it gets as bad as I let it get. I gave so much of myself that I basically spun into "Who am I if I can't help these people?" mode. That is avoidable and it really does take adhering to a "I am like a muscle that can only do what I can do without tearing and requiring rest/recovery" mindset to get untracked from burnout.

I have a lot to say about how nursing homes and prisons and elected officials where I live, but this isn't the place for that.

Leaving is better than imploding your life for work, even the best work.

The people doing the Great Resignation are mostly staying home or shifting to part time hours somewhere else. For the most part, that's a healthier choice for them and the places that aren't experiencing this level of resignation do a better job of providing solutions for benefits, work environment, childcare, adult care, and actually delivering support that is needed to prevent burnout.

Nurses in the US are getting hammered so damn hard by this COVID thing and it's because the medical industry in the US generally staffs too low, creates shifts that are too long, and spends too much time interfacing with the insanity that is the non-functioning patchwork of private and public health insurance. It's like a gigantic stress test that is showing where all the seams are in our society and the people taking the damage from that are mostly the ones who can least afford to.

This post has been edited by amphibian: 09 January 2022 - 01:37 AM

[HoosierDaddy]

I cant imagine my life if I had gone into practice, Amph.

If I have this much trouble separating work from my personal life and sense of overall worth and purpose, law would have killed me.

Work "responsibility" and "ownership" nearly did anyway and none of it was nearly as impactful and privileged as what lawyers do.

I hope you are taking better care of yourself and being better at recognizing the fatigue signs. It's rough. You have to be zealous and care but can't let it dominate your life and that is a circus wire balancing act.

[amphibian]

HoosierDaddy, on 09 January 2022 - 02:38 AM, said:

I cant imagine my life if I had gone into practice, Amph.

If I have this much trouble separating work from my personal life and sense of overall worth and purpose, law would have killed me.

Work "responsibility" and "ownership" nearly did anyway and none of it was nearly as impactful and privileged as what lawyers do.

I hope you are taking better care of yourself and being better at recognizing the fatigue signs. It's rough. You have to be zealous and care but can't let it dominate your life and that is a circus wire balancing act.

Thank you, HD. I am taking better care of myself and I am fortunate to have a best friend who was there for me at every step of this. I took care not to dump on her or overwhelm her too, so she and I have really taken care of each other.

I also want to say that what I experienced is not special because I am a lawyer. That piece of paper/skill set doesn't mean that what other people felt and still feel isn't also super hard to deal with and navigate. There's room in this empathy boat for everyone who wants to be in there.

[Mezla PigDog]

Are we in death throes of western capitalism as we know it? Is the work force so burnt out that the social contracts are breaking down? Or are we all snowflakes / have a greater understanding of our own worth than our forebears? The jobs described by Amph and Apt are generally jobs for the greater good. I'd like to put my own in that bracket because that's the reason I don't move for a better paying role - I reckon I'd be worked as hard for more cash but couldn't say I was standing between patient safety and companies making profit. But it sounds like we've all been cut to the bone in the name of 'efficiency' but then had no reserves to get through the pandemic. Year 1 of covid and WFH I did really well as I had previously been travelling a lot for work and miserable so being at home, my son was young enough he didn't need a curriculum, the other half did more childcare, it was pretty sweet. Year 2 was the absolute pits via home school and increased work pressure and the walls closing in. Year 3 feels like if I don't tip the work life balance back in favour of my life then something drastic needs to happen. Not sure what though.

Who has a good employer? And why are they good? Mine is good on paper. Flexible working, we are allowed half a day off a week or one day every 2 weeks if we have worked the hours, reasonable pay but not as high as I could get elsewhere, benefits are alright, 27 days paid leave. The problem is all about the volume of work and lack of support from superiors. They just squeeze us for more and more every year despite constantly reporting record profits. Flexibility has morphed into working constantly.

[James Hutton]

Mezla PigDog, on 10 January 2022 - 09:21 PM, said:

Are we in death throes of western capitalism as we know it?

Could be! I'm kinda hoping it, because it's not a sustainable system. Although I'm uncertain of what will come in its place.

I've worked at a University and now work at a non-profit organization, and I can't imagine working for a company in health and happiness. Hell, I can't even imagine working full-time. Did the burn-out thing a few years back, haven't recovered from that yet fully, because of reasons with the pandemic being a big one of them. This year I went back to my therapist that I consulted for my burn-out to get treatment for depression. It ain't all because of work and not all because of outside influences, but western capitalism is definitely not a positive factor in my mental health.

I'm not sure if we're better at understanding our own worth today compared to previous generations. I was talking to a friend about this, and he told a story about his father's work-ethos. He said he did his job well, but the second his shift was over, he dropped everything work-related. That's a mentality that didn't make it from father to son, for sure.

[Macros]

We work more now than back in the 60s/70s on average I'm fairly sure.
I'll see if I can dig out where I made that info up from.

How many houses were double income back then? How many had to be? Costs of living have steadily risen with no tracking of take home wages, most households couldn't survive on a single income now.

[amphibian]

Mezla PigDog, on 10 January 2022 - 09:21 PM, said:

Are we in death throes of western capitalism as we know it? Is the work force so burnt out that the social contracts are breaking down? Or are we all snowflakes / have a greater understanding of our own worth than our forebears? The jobs described by Amph and Apt are generally jobs for the greater good. I'd like to put my own in that bracket because that's the reason I don't move for a better paying role - I reckon I'd be worked as hard for more cash but couldn't say I was standing between patient safety and companies making profit. But it sounds like we've all been cut to the bone in the name of 'efficiency' but then had no reserves to get through the pandemic. Year 1 of covid and WFH I did really well as I had previously been travelling a lot for work and miserable so being at home, my son was young enough he didn't need a curriculum, the other half did more childcare, it was pretty sweet. Year 2 was the absolute pits via home school and increased work pressure and the walls closing in. Year 3 feels like if I don't tip the work life balance back in favour of my life then something drastic needs to happen. Not sure what though.

Who has a good employer? And why are they good? Mine is good on paper. Flexible working, we are allowed half a day off a week or one day every 2 weeks if we have worked the hours, reasonable pay but not as high as I could get elsewhere, benefits are alright, 27 days paid leave. The problem is all about the volume of work and lack of support from superiors. They just squeeze us for more and more every year despite constantly reporting record profits. Flexibility has morphed into working constantly.

My previous employer covered my full healthcare premium and was initially great about working 9-6, no bothers on the weekend. It was full of fun people and things were trending towards being more inclusive of the non-attorney personnel in the stuff attorneys did (big positive for me since I love connecting with others and got a ton of useful things/ideas/help from non-attorneys all the time) But within 2 years of my being there, almost every person I had a mentor or senior colleague relationship with left or retired early to get out of there. I kinda kept my head down and didn't pay that much attention to their discontent and that was in retrospect a huge sign that something was going slowly wrong - which the pandemic later exposed in a big way. The lack of support at the higher levels, the increased expectations to manage with less, and the absolutely glacial pace it took for decisions to come down from above + the occasional senior person who'd throw people under the blame bus really made for a crappier and crappier workplace over time.

I don't think a workplace is fully good or fully bad. However, a workplace and superiors that do not do much about volume of work and lack of support for years on end is a place that will burn out just about everyone who works there. It takes quite a bit to burn out non-profit/greater good people who do not have their heads in the clouds, but these places in general will get there.

A friend of mine went to grad school in Alabama to get a masters in behavioral analysis and wanted to work with kids. As part of her post-graduate work requirements, she had to give 2 years to a state facility. She did that and in the midst of her fourth year, things reached a critical point with lack of support and work overload such that she had an actual meltdown in December at work over something relatively inconsequential. She had enough vacation saved up to take a month off and with some intense therapy work and her own self-examination, she's getting out of that place to go work a different job. The main thing that she talked about was that she trained for years to be a behavioral analyst and 4 years in, 80% of her job was not behavioral analysis and she was expected to run a department on a shoestring budget with a shoestring level of staffing. That level of lack of support cracked her resolve and capacity to cope in a way that was more visible than my experience at my old workplace.

I think shutting one's self off from the frustrations of lack of support/hiring people to help is functionally hitting a snooze button on an alarm for some people. That alarm is going to go off at some point and we might not be prepared for it. The healthy choices are to 1) get that support or 2) leave. It's scary to leave, but most likely it'll be to a place that pays more and has a decent chance of being a bit healthier or at least differently unhealthy enough to provide time/space to find a healthy landing spot.

[Maark Abbott]

Mezla PigDog, on 06 January 2022 - 12:41 PM, said:

Is anyone particularly good at only working their contracted work hours and then switching off the stresses of work out of hours? And if so, do you have any habits that you think help you to cultivate this mindset?

It's a semi NY resolution of mine but I don't think I have the appropriate skills to succeed, especially whilst full time working from home. I know it makes sense but I know I'll get sucked in because I always do.

I take the tovarich approach. I work my contracted hours only. I start at 9am prompt, log off at 12pm for lunch and back on at 1pm (if I go on lunch late I take my full hour to the minute). I clock off at 5pm sharp. And I clock off by shutting my work PC down entirely. The works phone is software based so it can't disturb me. I also have our work whatsapp muted so that I only look at it when I need to, and I don't answer work whatsapp messages after hours.

It's actually incredibly easy to switch off for me - it's simply taken the mindset of "I will not allow my labour to be exploited and work for free". I then distract myself with weebshit, games, writing, any interests really. My work life balance has been correct for a while due to this.

[James Hutton]

Maark Abbott, on 12 January 2022 - 08:42 AM, said:

Mezla PigDog, on 06 January 2022 - 12:41 PM, said:

Is anyone particularly good at only working their contracted work hours and then switching off the stresses of work out of hours? And if so, do you have any habits that you think help you to cultivate this mindset?

It's a semi NY resolution of mine but I don't think I have the appropriate skills to succeed, especially whilst full time working from home. I know it makes sense but I know I'll get sucked in because I always do.

I take the tovarich approach. I work my contracted hours only. I start at 9am prompt, log off at 12pm for lunch and back on at 1pm (if I go on lunch late I take my full hour to the minute). I clock off at 5pm sharp. And I clock off by shutting my work PC down entirely. The works phone is software based so it can't disturb me. I also have our work whatsapp muted so that I only look at it when I need to, and I don't answer work whatsapp messages after hours.

It's actually incredibly easy to switch off for me - it's simply taken the mindset of "I will not allow my labour to be exploited and work for free". I then distract myself with weebshit, games, writing, any interests really. My work life balance has been correct for a while due to this.

This is what I'm aiming for.

[Maark Abbott]

James Hutton, on 12 January 2022 - 09:36 AM, said:

Maark Abbott, on 12 January 2022 - 08:42 AM, said:

Mezla PigDog, on 06 January 2022 - 12:41 PM, said:

Is anyone particularly good at only working their contracted work hours and then switching off the stresses of work out of hours? And if so, do you have any habits that you think help you to cultivate this mindset?

It's a semi NY resolution of mine but I don't think I have the appropriate skills to succeed, especially whilst full time working from home. I know it makes sense but I know I'll get sucked in because I always do.

I take the tovarich approach. I work my contracted hours only. I start at 9am prompt, log off at 12pm for lunch and back on at 1pm (if I go on lunch late I take my full hour to the minute). I clock off at 5pm sharp. And I clock off by shutting my work PC down entirely. The works phone is software based so it can't disturb me. I also have our work whatsapp muted so that I only look at it when I need to, and I don't answer work whatsapp messages after hours.

It's actually incredibly easy to switch off for me - it's simply taken the mindset of "I will not allow my labour to be exploited and work for free". I then distract myself with weebshit, games, writing, any interests really. My work life balance has been correct for a while due to this.

This is what I'm aiming for.

Don't aim for it - do it. Just DO IT. Be a stubborn fruitloop about it. Be like some unholy combination of me and Macros post alcohol doing Potaro Fusion. Show them your scorn, and your fury!

[James Hutton]

I will, but I have to translate this attitude to my job which is roughly the opposite of a desk job. I work at a live music venue / concert hall that doubles as a club at night (but we've been mostly closed the last 2 years) as something akin to a floor manager. The translating part is why I'm still aiming instead of doing.

[James Hutton]

I'm reading WHAT ABOUT ME? by PAUL VERHAEGHE, since I read an interview on his latest book (which is in Dutch only, the title'd translate to KEEP YOUR DISTANCE, HOLD ME) about how the changing values of our society affects us, especially with a pandemic going on. I thought anybody reading this thread might be interested in it.
https://www.goodread...t-based-society