Table 2.

A manager’s story of the stress of reorganisation

One (member of staff) who is very, let me just try and think of the wording for it, very committed, very conscientious, always increasingly finding it difficult because he couldn’t give his clients what they needed so that weighed heavy on him, couldn’t get his documentation up to date because that’s a demand from management that your documentation is up to date and trying to fulfil all those roles is really difficult. So we had supervision and it’s particularly since the change of this new redesign and what I tried to do with him is spend time out of the office so that he wasn’t part of things going on in the office so that he could quietly get on with some of his documentation in a quiet environment, tried to hold back any allocations for a bit until he felt more on top of his work … So I did listen and I did what I could but he could accept I was limited because the expectation on the team from higher management. I actually declared the service unsafe because the other stress on the team was that two (members of staff) went off on long-term sick and I realised I’d got to allocate all those cases because we haven’t got any (staff) that have light (caseloads) anymore and so that put extra strain and at that point I declared the service unsafe. … we keep on being told that there’s no money for extra staff. We ended up with a member of staff (from another team) coming over into our team and that was only because I fought for it because I said, ‘Look staff can’t continue under these levels’. But that person ended up resigning and he was brilliant, no job to go to, so I suppose using that as an example he was very positive about my input, he wasn’t positive about the higher management and … how they’ve managed this redesign and the pressure they’ve put on staff and he was very vocal about that on leaving. But I felt my hands were tied, I’d done as much as I could because I tried to support him through it … that came out on his exit interview and everything and when he resigned saying the job was untenable … (Manager, M1)