The Workplace and Working Life

Story · all 20 words

The Rota on the Back of the Door

The rota was a sheet of A4 on the back of the office door, in pencil, and it governed the lives of nineteen people.

It was a residential home for twenty-six residents, and I worked there for three years in my late twenties, mostly on the late shift, which ran two till ten and which I preferred because the building was calmer and because I could sleep in.

The staff were, without exception, better people than I was. I want to say that at the start. Carers on slightly above minimum wage doing work that is physically hard and emotionally much harder, and doing it well, on a rota written in pencil because it changed constantly.

My commute was eleven minutes on a bicycle. It is the only job I have ever had where I did not commute in any meaningful sense, and I did not appreciate what that was worth until I had a job where I did.

The workload was not the problem. The problem was that the workload had no floor. There was always one more thing that would make somebody’s evening slightly better, and no point at which you could say you had finished.

And there was the paperwork, which everybody outside that industry underestimates. Medication records, incident forms, care plans, fluid charts. Every one of them exists for an extremely good reason, usually a terrible thing that happened somewhere else, and together they took about ninety minutes a shift that were not in anybody’s calculation of how long the job takes. The care plan reviews had a monthly deadline which, in three years, I never once saw met on time.

My line manager was a woman called Pauline who had started there as an eighteen-year-old and was now, at fifty-one, in charge of everything and paid roughly what a supermarket deputy manager is paid.

The winter that broke us was 2016. Two carers left within a fortnight and the agency could not fill either post, and so those of us who remained had to cover for them – not as a favour, but as an ongoing structural fact, for four months.

I did somewhere near two hundred hours of overtime that winter. Some of it was paid. A good deal of it was the twenty minutes at the end of a shift that nobody records anywhere.

I was permanently snowed under and so was everybody else, and the thing that goes first is not the work – the residents were fine, the residents were always fine, we would have collapsed before we let that slip – the thing that goes first is morale. People stop making tea for each other. That is the actual early warning sign and I have watched for it in every job since.

What Pauline did was small and I have thought about it for nine years. She could not fix the staffing, she had no budget and no authority to hire, and she was not going to pretend otherwise. So she did three things.

She made the rota genuinely flexible – if you could find your own swap, she would sign it, no questions, same day. She began to chase up head office weekly, in writing, and she copied all of us in, so that we could see somebody was fighting even though nothing was happening. And she made everybody take a proper day off, and refused to let anybody bank them, because she said people who bank days off never take them.

None of that solved anything. All of it helped.

We did get through the winter. Two new carers started in April, one of whom is still there. Nobody left in a bad way and nobody was hurt, which in that industry that year was not a given.

I could not sort out a single one of the structural problems in that building and neither could Pauline. But I learned there what I think is the only real management lesson: you cannot always deal with the cause, and pretending you can is what destroys trust. You can be honest about it, and you can protect people’s day off, and it turns out that counts for a great deal more than I would have believed at twenty-seven.

A colleague from then still sends me a message every Christmas. Nine years. We have never once discussed anything except that winter.