Bullying for Britain

To be fair to Dominic Raab (and you don't know how much it hurts me to type those words), who has been forced to resign as Justice Secretary over allegations he bullied staff, bullying, in my experience, seem to characterise what passes for management in the Ministry of Justice.  Well, the bit that I used to work in, at least.  The problem was that there were far too many managers who had quite obviously been promoted far beyond their abilities and their only response when they found themselves challenged was to resort to trying to micro-manage staff and, failing that, to bully them.  It was usually very low level, often passive aggressive, focusing on nit-picking, moving goal posts without warning, setting arbitrary targets and generally trying to undermine the confidence of any dissenting staff by using these new criteria to 'prove' they were under performing or, worse, incompetent.  (By 'dissenting staff', I mean anyone with the audacity to pint out when these 'managers' were wrong, misapplying or misunderstanding regulations and guidelines or that the policies they were pursuing were flawed).  I know, I went through it all after having it seen done to colleagues.  I got the distinct impression that those of us with the longest service in our particular role (and therefore the most experience and knowledge of how the job should be done), were systematically targeted for harassment by management.  Once the two colleagues with seniority over me had been forced into taking retirement, it was my turn.

I endured it all - the constant attempts to undermine my confidence, the abuse of the staff reporting system, even an attempt to apply the disciplinary process inappropriately.  (This latter incident turned into a farce as, after I had returned to work after a lengthy period on sick leave - work-related stress had resulted in extreme hyper tension and type two diabetes -  I faced an attempt to, in effect, dismiss me for 'gross misconduct'.  The trouble was that the exact nature of the charges were never clear to either myself or my union rep.  Not surprisingly, it all fell at the fist hurdle as not only had those responsible been incompetent with regard to following correct procedure, undermining their case, but they also failed to come up with anything substantive to back up their vague allegations.  So it all had to be dropped).  The abuse of the reporting system was interesting, (I was far from alone in suffering this), as it hinged on a radical change that had been made to the system.  Basically, as one manager put it, doing your job well was no longer enough.  If a manager didn't like your 'attitude', for instance, they could mark you down on your annual report.  They could mark you down, in fact, for all manner of bizarre reasons - often without having to back up their allegations.  (Twice, I was penalised in the reporting process for having had alleged complaints made against me - despite the fact that, prior to this, no formal complaint procedures had ever been instigated against me, nor had I ever been informed of any such complaints.  Moreover, when challenged, the relevant managers were unable to substantiate details of either of these supposed complaints.  Yet the penalties stood).  Of course, this new policy of meaning that your actual ability to do your job was no longer the main criteria in assessing performance just made the management situation worse, as it meant that every chancer, bullshitter and sycophant saw their chance to get promoted despite their failings in their current roles and generally got promoted.

Now, I know what you are thinking: he's a disgruntled ex-employee and clearly an awkward bastard, so he would present himself as the victim, wouldn't he?  Well, fair enough.  I certainly wouldn't claim to be entirely blameless in all this: I had long grown tired of the job and was still doing it primarily to build up my pension credits.  To be honest, toward the end I was doing only what was absolutely essential, (although that was largely a reaction to the shit I was taking from management).  There were times when I probably should have kept my head down and held my counsel, but, I just can't help myself and I made clear what I thought of some policies, which generally went down like a lead balloon.  I'm not claiming that I was a man more sinned against than sinning, but from where I was sitting, I was taking some unfair heat.  There were times when I worked my arse off, covering other peoples' jobs as well as doing my own for extended period and was rewarded by being marked down in my annual assessments on the basis of unsubstantiated 'complaints'.  I became seriously ill as a result of the stress of all this, came back to work too early and found myself embroiled in a disciplinary process.  So I don't think that I'm being paranoid.  

There's an interesting coda to all this.  After lock down ended and I went back to the office, as we still couldn't work the streets  (which was most of my job), they didn't have any actual work for me, so instead had me going over everybody's warrant lists, ensuring that the paper records tallied with what was on the IT system.  Now, after all the implications that I wasn't doing enough and wasn't getting the required results, you can imagine my surprise when I found that my colleagues' clearance rates, (which, it had been implied, were superior to mine), were actually no better than mine.  Their record keeping was also worse than mine, (something else I was apparently failing at), either that, or they really weren't making the visits they should have been.  At which point, not surprisingly, I finally decided to call it a day and go into my current semi-retirement.  It was clearly pointless carrying on as how well or poorly I did the job had obviously become irrelevant.  Both my physical and mental health have improved immeasurably since I left the Ministry of Justice.  While I'm sorry that various senior civil servants in the department feel that they were subjected to bullying by Domnic Raab, I can't help but feel that they really should also be looking at the management culture of their oeganisation's lower echelons and seeing the level of bullying that those lower down the pay scale - who are unable to put in the sorts of complaints that they were able to - have to endure, day in, day out.