The most stressful place I have ever worked - Research Team Member Learning and Work Institute Employee Review

The major con at L&W is the workload. Projects are consistently under costed, with the burden of the extra work falling on staff, and working well over your contracted hours every week considered the norm. This is raised on a regular basis by staff, and is the main reason for people leaving the company, but nothing changes. There is a capacity planner, designed to avoid over working, but I was consistently shut down when trying to add days to my planner for various pieces of project and non-project work. Taking on additional responsibilities, such as line management, is expected to be absorbed into your time. This leads to managers not having enough time to focus on the staff they manage, and the staff being managed poorly. Secondly, communication within the organisation is either non-existent or poor when it arrives. This is true for company matters, such as people leaving or internal policies, and within projects. One of the worst impacts of this is that each senior member of staff expects different outcomes and standards on projects. A project can be signed off by one level of senior staff, and then have to be re-written once reviewed by another. This falls to the more junior members of staff, and this additional work is again expected to be absorbed alongside an already overly full workload. The poor communication was even worse during the COVID-19 pandemic. There was very little communication about what was going on, what plans were to reopen the office, and virtually no support to get through this major change to everyone’s jobs and lives. Beyond the necessary providing of equipment, there was basically no acknowledgement that anything had changed. Thirdly, for an organisation supposedly dedicated to lifelong learning and good employment in wider society, they could not be worse at this internally. They are accredited by investors in people, but I am very unclear as to how they passed this. In my time there I never witnessed any request for external training being signed off. The internal training programme did improve during my time there, but once again this was not taken into account with workloads - increasing the amount of work for junior members of staff. There is also a real lack of progression opportunities – partly because of the nature of being a small business, but also because the structure and the active dissuasion from applying for a more senior role. I also witnessed extremely poor behaviour by senior management towards several colleagues with poor mental health. They don't take mental health seriously (apart from through lip service and team meetings about how to improve it through going for a walk), and completely ignore the impact of being overworked and undervalued has on staff. Dismissal of mental health issues caused by the stress of overworking, and witnessing the poor treatment of colleagues, only adds to the stress and anxiety associated with working at L&W. Finally, they are not committed to diversity and inclusion. In the summer of 2020, as most organisations were taking the long overdue opportunity to look inwards at their attitudes and approaches towards BAME people broadly, and black people specifically, it took several members of staff joining together and taking it on themselves to get any response or acknowledgment of the issues at all. Staff then came together and came up with ideas both big and small, and nearly every one was shot down or stopped by senior management or HR. Even small things like a sentence saying we would welcome applications from BAME candidates in job adverts was signed off by senior staff, and the HR team removed it. Some staff also tried to make other small changes, like including pronouns in our email signatures, and were told they were not allowed to do so. Social justice and inclusion is one of the key work strands for L&W, but when any internal improvements are brought to them they either ignore it or actively shut it down.