Jane got the short straw

The charity I work for supports unpaid family carers. Up until this financial year end, a big chunk of our work was funded by the local authority, with grants from other organisations letting us ice the cake and put a cherry on top.

In its infinite wisdom, the local authority awarded the contract to another organisation, one from another county (despite the bids having to blurb on about local social value) who just pipped us at the post in the tender process.  It really was a close pip – they beat us by just four percentage points.

The last few months have been pretty horrible. The new organisation has TUPE’d over some of our staff; we have bent over backwards to be fair, giving them access to our employees when we had no obligation or need to do so. The new organisation has not attempted to negotiate any partnership work, they are just bulldozing ahead with their carers support model (which incidentally means all the support workers will be community based (no office base) and effectively be working from home). This is hard when dealing with some tricky cases, people need to debrief and talking to colleagues was the easiest and most effective way of doing this.

The staff have now been with them for a week and two days. In that time, they have changed the structure with which they won the tender and have made up new jobs to suit the people who have gone over to them. That’s all ok, organisations need to be flexible and react to changing situations.

Is this next bit fair though?

There are four acute hospitals in our county, each of them had a dedicated worker and there was one hospital lead.  The original hospital lead, Vanessa, has been given the job of all-county Manager.

One of the hospital workers, Katy, has left. One of them, Coral, applied for a small promotion and got it. Another one, Nicole, was given a hospital lead job which was not part of the original structure – it seems the organisation just added this job and gave it to her. The final hospital worker, Jane, was on leave last week and came home at the weekend to find that this has happened. At no time was Nicole’s new job of hospital lead advertised and Jane didn’t get any chance to apply for it – which she would have done as she had already expressed interest in progressing.

This happened after the workers had all started in their new roles – surely Jane should have had the opportunity to apply for the job? She came in to see me today and was visibly upset at how this has happened.

I sat down with her and helped her compose an email to HR, but I don’t know if she’ll send it; she seemed so defeated and deflated:

“Dear Jackie, (HR of new organisation)

I have just returned from leave to find out (from Facebook of all places) that in my absence a new lead position was created in ‘county’ and filled by a hospital liaison staff member who was TUPE’d over to you. As you can imagine, I was really disappointed to learn this.

Please can you tell me why this position was not advertised so that I could have had a chance to apply? You were fully aware that I wanted to progress from my current role as I expressed interest in a lead position at our initial interview.

Please can you let me know?

Thank you.

Jane”