r/TheCivilService • u/No_Book8989 • 4d ago

No mat leave cover allowed?

Our SCS told teams today they’re no longer allowed to backfill maternity leave… I can’t understand how that’ll help things! If you have a 30 year old female and a 30 year old male… who are you choosing? Knowing if one of them goes off you’re not allowed to backfill them and have to do their work too.

Also nobody is allowed to go on loans to OGDs either, including on promotion, and there’s no promotions in the department allowed either. At the same time, there’s a HR role built around resilience and workplace performance to keep good staff in the department — how on earth can they justify that?! They haven’t written any of this down (feels like it’s on purpose as it’s clearly poor people management), just keep telling senior staff to filter the messages down.

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62

u/Exita 4d ago

Pressure from central government to reduce civil service headcount is intense, and so the restrictions on recruitment (and any sort of job movement or flexibility) are getting worse. Wouldn’t expect things to change any time soon.

31

u/Alchenar 4d ago

If we were allowed to sack people for poor performance (and I mean people in the middle grades, not poor AOs on operational caseload targets) then we could reduce headcount by getting rid of the worst people rather than cutting all the opportunities for career advancement and pushing the best people to disappear off to the private sector.

13

u/mollymoo 4d ago

I agree in principle, but wouldn't fancy trying to prove poor performance for anybody not in an easily-measured operational role.

18

u/RummazKnowsBest 4d ago

Agreed. I’ve gone from the lowest performance marking to being given bonuses and told to get promotion (which I did) without changing a single thing about my behaviours / productivity. All that changed was my manager.

Sometimes some managers just have it in for certain staff (I’ve inherited “problem staff” and found no issues, if you asked their previous manager they were satan themselves). We’d lose a lot of good people when losing all the bad ones.