Working in the eye of a storm

Trying to find a solution to a problem is sometimes like trying to find the needle in a haystack and when you find a solution to the problem it might sting a little bit at first as a result of trying to get to the point!

My boss resigned last week after over 1 year of being in the job and after 1 month of being on sick leave for a variety of reasons. She simply lost the will to work at the council anymore and her understanding and interpretation of the situation meant she had valid reasons to seek out pastures new and ensure she could do something else that would enable her to heal and not continue to be unwell.

The senior management are already circling what is left of my team asking questions such as what should we do differently? Who should we hire next? Who do we need to hire? What problems are we going to get? What solutions can be found and finally what can they afford to do to solve the problems?

One of the crazy things is the team that we work for and causes me and my colleagues the most problems is one in which generates an income stream on its own through collecting of fees and processing payments, the problem is that there are not enough staff to process these payments efficiently, accurately and in a timely manner and at times such as school holidays and bank holidays like Easter then the staff want to book time off to recover, recuperate and enjoy themselves with their families leads to there being even less staff around to process those applications and take the payments. A member of that team also handed in there notice to leave today too and that will make things worse for me and my team as well as the team she is leaving.

So with all this going on and me thinking I am doing ok and ready for bed I go to bed feeling wide awake and write a to do list for myself for work and then start writing this blog post because I still cannot sleep.

I am the most long serving member of my team and have worked for two managers who have no left and 5 further members of staff since I started working there in July 2020, considering our team only has about 3 to 4 people in it at any one time that is quite a high staff turnover.

With the potential changes coming into force I am not sure yet if they will get a new manager for the team and the senior management team might just decide to split what is left of the team and allocate us to different areas to act directly as support staff to other manages rather than a central team of support staff. It could work well but if they are doing it as a money saving exercise rather than a problem solving one then their thought process will be flawed. So I have jotted down my ideas for a restructure on an email to myself for work and will forward them to a senior manager to look at in the morning.

I hope this post has managed to exorcise a few of my present demons so that I can try and get back to sleep now. Luckily I did not have access to the temptation of cigarettes or anything else to smoke tonight nor have I tried to do such things for what must be nearly some 15 years now, alas those where the days long time passed now!