Holy Shitballs, WTF is going on in my office this week.
For context, I work for a big government agency in a western county. My department of about 90 performs a regulatory function for the rest of the organisation and I am at the top of the bottom in the heirachy of a team of 30ish in a quite well paid senior technical role with no direct reports. I spend my day dealing with a small case load and providing technical support to the wider technical team. There are a couple of things that haven't really been adequately empowered to me in my role, but I have not died on that hill. I barely talk to my team leader, on account of a) having a habit on challenging him on his technical decisions and b) him being generally checked out. His manager likes to do 18 hours a day and micromanage all 30 of us without ever achieving any meaningful engagement. It is mildly toxic, but I get to work from home, and the money is good so I ignore most of the drama and just potter along.
Anyways, recently all shit has gone down.
– Last week the director (in charge of the overall team of 90) announced a small restructure. This didn't affect my job security (employment contracts are strong where I live), but it did introduce principal technical role that was disturbingly similar to my job description. I have raised this with HR and indicated that they will need to either appoint me to this role by right (as per organisational/union guidelines) or clarify where my current role sits relative and empower the full provisions of my current role (which will dilute the new role). The hypothesis among my confidant collegues is that this is to get checked out team leader into a non people leader role to allow some more proactive team leaders to be appointed, and the management didn't really think of the implications.
– Yesterday at 5.15 (after most of us had logged off) the director sent a meeting request for 8.30 this morning – which I saw at 8ish when I turned my computer on and had to do the school run in a hurry to attend
– This meeting was to discuss some massive changes to how we organise our overall workflow, including a change in a workflow that me and another collegue have been working on for months (and battling with checked out TL and Micromanager all the way). No agenda or discussion points had been sent out with the request. The people at the meeting were an incomplete selection of the senior technical officers and one intermediate officer who was not sure why she was there. We had to spend the whole time trying to think on our feet for a solution to a problem we had only just heard about, including the legal process we need to follow. The Director had also spend the whole previous day grilling one of my confidants on what he thinks of the process and heirachy.
– This resulted in a “consultation” being sent out at about 3pm for feedback, and a meeting organised for 10.30 tomorrow to announce decisions, with rollout on Monday. This is for a significant shift in approach to how we conduct our business and will mean massive shift in reponsibilities and tasks for the whole team.
– All this has been done while the workaholic micromanager is overseas on holiday. despite the fact that she is still micromanaging on holiday, she has not been circulated any of the emails of the last few days with a note on the correspondendence that she will be “updated” on Monday.
This is very bizzare on account of most of the changes in our team being tediously slow or just fizzling out to status quo. I have become used to ill thought out policy direction, but never anything with any real implications. It feels like we are just throwing an already chaotic team up in the air and hoping it lands in a more orderly fashion. It won't, but I am intrigued to see where it does land. I will be honest that I hope to get something out of it too, but am not holding my breath. I have not really done much routine work this week on account of being blindsided by all this and trying to be proactive in my responses. To not engage in this would be counter productive.
Things are moving very fast, so I will update if any more drama happens.