So about 18 months ago I was fired for a very annoying reason…I realise now after a lot of anger about it that what I did was technically wrong and so I am less angry about the reason I was fired. Now the company are asking for my help and to potentially come back as they have been in their words “completely screwed” without me over the last 18 months.
Just for a quick note on why I was fired, for 5 years I was asked by multiple managers in my company (a large multi million pound corporate company) to sign in on their logins and approve payments for our workforce. The previous 3 years to that we had had a system that did not require any approval process so the managers were all not bothered by approving as myself and a lot of the other administrators had been working for years on the system that required no approval so once it came in, basically they couldn't be bothered to do it as it used to take around an hour to do every day. I was not the only admin doing this, I was just the only one caught. Got pulled up on IT policy for using someone else's login, blah blah blah, fired for it and a couple of the managers that were instructing me to do so jumped before they were pushed. I was naive and thought that because I had been instructed to do it I would get disciplined but not fired, that was a steep learning curve.
Since then I have been used once for a few days as a “consultant” as once they got rid of me they realised how much I used to do. About 6 months after I had been fired they were screwed on recruitment and onboarding so paid me 3 days at £600 a day to catch them back up and train the new admin on how to do those bits. In 18 months they have chewed through 6 admins in the same role that I was in for 8 years…
They have just had their first H&S, ISO and Transport audit since I was fired and scored ridiculously badly, lowest in the company and on the verge of being shut down for H&S issues. I took care of everything to do with this, turns out since I've been gone no one has been doing anything more than the bare legal minimum. Cue the email to me asking if I would agree to come back to the company full time on a higher wage and in a management position rather than an administrator, I said I wouldn't come back but may consider consulting again for them on the same rate I had previously consulted at.
I used to do the following for the company, which now I am working somewhere else I realise was a ridiculous amount of responsibility to load onto an administrator:
Payroll and Finance
Transport
ISO Quality Management
Health & Safety
Recruitment
Onboarding
General Administration and Personal Administration
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I don't cover half of what I used to and now I am a Logistics Manager…
They have said they can't warrant £600 a day for a consultancy for helping them with all the above, do I negotiate or just leave them to suffer?