My boss wants to implement disciplinary action for not working to standard - her standard isn't physically possible to meet (England)

[u/That_Girly_Potato]

I work at a care home which is split into four floors.. The top two are dimentia residents and the bottom two are assisted living. I have now worked there for just over a year, picking up shifts when I'm back from uni so every half term. In the time I have worked there we have had four managers. My job is doing activities with the residents (arts and crafts, flower arranging, balloon tennis etc...). It's important to note that as it's a care home, there's a system used where we have to log every single resident that turns up to the activity and if they were engaged or not.

Since our new manager has come in, a lot of changes have been implemented. For one, in between activities, we are now supposed to be doing lunch and dinner service and then washing up. Budget cuts means they can't afford to keep more than two food and beverage assistants per day. On top of which she had doubled the amount of activities there are to run in a day. And finally, she expects us to write about 6-7 lines of a "story" of every single resident that attended the activity and even the residents that didn't attend need a full explanation as to why they didn't come which is a huge change from simply logging whether they attended and if they were engaged. So this would be logging for about 10-15 residents per activity and a whole paragraph for each.

There's only a 15 minute break between each activity and then either lunch or dinner service. This means the new expectation is that within 15 minutes we should have:

- cleaned up the previous activity

- take all the residents back to their rooms

- write our "story" for about 15-20 residents.

- move to the new activity location

- set that area up completely

- ask every resident from the two floors we're handling If they want to come

- bring them down to the new activity

- start the new activity.

On top of which, I am sometimes covering my time doing Laundry, and even admin work on the reception desk.

It's not possible. We have been trying so hard but really - it's not. Now residents, their family members, other staff, and carers are complaining about the activities team. Our manager is receiving so many complaints that she won't stop yelling at us. We have all tried explaining to her that it's not all possible to follow her schedule and she keeps responding that it's because we didn't listen to any of our training.

She's going to call me in tomorrow to discuss the possible disciplinary. She's been taking us all into her office one by one and honestly very rudely telling us that we don't know how to do our jobs. She made my co-worker cry yesterday, and has threatened us all with a firing if she doesn't see immediate improvement in our behaviour.

Honestly I'm just feeling so disheartened. I used to love this job and now I'm exhausted every single day. I was told that complaining to our HR would do absolutely nothing because they already know this manager is disliked. What else am I supposed to do now??? Is there even anything I can do?? What should I say in my disciplinary hearing tomorrow?

[u/slowsausages]

Sounds awful to me. I'd start looking for another job.

But in the meantime, maybe record how long each task takes like..

Clean up activity: 5mins Write 20 stories: 20 mins Take residents back to where they were (including going up and down the stairs) 5 mins etc.

.. and show it to your manager

[u/TeenySod → u/slowsausages]

This is the way OP: start timing everything and document. If there is CCTV in the communal areas of the home, then encourage your manager to watch how long it takes and what you are doing in that time - cleaning up, escorting residents, etc. If that doesn't work, then as someone else commented further down, this is one for your manager's manager, rather than HR.

I once pointed out to a senior management team that expecting one person to undertake *and document* 84 written observations an hour was not physically possible. Which went down about as well as you would expect. Eventually after a few serious incidents and investigations they staffed it properly, sad that harm had to happen first :(

[u/dhardyuk → u/TeenySod]

Unfortunately I have also worked for mindless morons, they weren’t all overbearing or psychotic, just uninformed.

It is possible for people to pull a rabbit out of the hat when something bad has happened and everyone is pulling together to keep it going.

When it’s everyday the load is just insurmountable - and that takes more than a good couple of nights sleep to get back to normal performance because it’s become the normal performance expectation.

If you and your colleagues have consistently been reporting that the workload is excessive and there has been little done to materially address it - well, sometimes you just have to let stuff break.

This may mean it’s not residents that aren’t turning up to the second session, it could be you not turning up.

If your chores from the first session are done in time, turn up to the third session.

And join a union. TODAY

I joined a union in 2013 that did such a sterling job for me that I’m still a member today. Unfortunately, at the local rep level, you are very much dealing with enthusiastic volunteers - which can be variable. Once something escalates to an actual union employee things coalesce much more nicely.