slaving for bread, sir....

…And so it came to pass that six months to the day after my insourcing and some twenty-seven and a half months after I was originally outsourced, I have finally received my promotion. In spite of the fact that this is a promotion that I might reasonably have expected to happen several years ago, I’ve decided I am going to focus on the positives.

-> I don’t know the exact details yet, but I am going to be receiving a pay rise, an additional four days of holiday and a pretty reasonable car allowance. I haven’t had a proper pay rise since 2001, when I received a raise that took me past C’s annual salary for the first time in our respective careers. C. currently earns somewhere near double my salary, and is routinely offered jobs where the payrise is larger than my annual take home. In the main, I think this is a reflection on how good she is at her job, but it is also at least partly an indication on how little progress I have made with my own career. Yes, I know a lot of this is to do with my own inertia. Yes I know I could always have moved on. The fact is that I haven’t done, so to receive something now is a whole lot better than a kick in the teeth.

-> My boss put an awful lot of effort into getting me this promotion. Yes it was long overdue, but there were still lots of hoops that needed to be jumped through: there were promotion evaluation forms that needed filling out (when the forms hadn’t yet been produced); I needed to be scored against the job competencies for my new grade (when neither the competencies themselves nor the scores for the job itself had yet been produced); the HR department needed to be chivvied and chided to produce the necessary documentation and to set up the relevant promotional panels. My boss did all of these things and he made it as easy for me as possible. I saw a completed copy of my promotion case that someone had left lying on the printer the other day. I read through it and saw that not only had my boss carefully crafted it and sculpted it whilst I was on holiday, but that someone had added something really positive onto my CV that I had forgotten to put there myself. That was quite encouraging, I thought.

It is absolutely no coincidence that this has happened exactly six months to the day since I was insourced. The HR department have maintained that my terms and conditions of employment are protected for six months after my transfer. They have – incorrectly -- used a law that is there to protect me from an unscrupulous employer reducing my benefits as an excuse for not giving me an increase. It’s pathetic and the whole transfer has been a complete shambles. I have not yet received a definitive statement of my terms and conditions on transfer or a statement of what is happening to my pension. All of this has taken place whilst they are in the middle of relaunching the department and emphasising the team’s key values of trust, respect and understanding. It’s risible. Only today I was asked to complete a “Great Place to Work” survey. What are they expecting me to say, exactly? That life is just peachey?

But…

…at least something positive has finally happened.

Mind you, I was in a workshop yesterday and one of the exercises involved a bunch of my colleagues from around my department spending five minutes around a flipchart trying to put themselves into my shoes for a while and to capture a few words about how they thought I must feel in my job. When they presented back, I was a little taken aback to see the phrases that they had come up with:

“Unempowered”
“Bullied”
“The meat in the sandwich”
“Frustrated”
“No Career Path”

On the plus side, they also thought that I did as good a job as possible and that they valued my inclusive approach.

*deep sigh*

Work is proper bobbins though, eh?