Pluspunten
When I first joined the Service I felt that I was making a positive difference to people's lives, and that I had a rewarding career path with ample potential for personal growth. I knew that I was on the right side, always trying to do the right thing. But...
Minpunten
...in recent years the organisation has taken a series of cataclysmic lurches in an alarmingly negative direction, and it has become a profoundly demoralising place to work. Pretty much everyone I know is trying to get out, and all for the same reasons. Years ago, subject matter experts were seen as a valuable commodity - yet today everyone is expected to be broadly competent in all subjects and expert in none. Consequently, many cases end up being handled by people without the requisite specialist knowledge. This results in under-trained investigators making best guesses in complex and nuanced situations, and the subsequent decisions are often inconsistent or plain wrong. Quality checks seems to have been abandoned in some areas, with predictable consequences - it's pot luck whether or not cases are routed to someone competent. I feel deeply sorry for the front line investigators, who are expected to deal with consumers and businesses often about very technical things, but without even the most basic of required training. The executive team itself is profoundly inadequate and broadly mistrusted. The CEO is pushing through an extremely disruptive and unpopular programme of reforms in which all existing roles are being discarded and replaced with roles that look remarkably similar but with very little flexibility or career progression. This exercise is also being used as an excuse to clean out huge numbers of staff who do not find a suitable place for themselves in the new order. Consequently we are losing our most competent and valuable employees at an alarming rate and morale is lower than most of us ever thought possible. The ill-thought through changes dreamt up by the executive are dishonestly promoted as successful. There is a conspicuous lack of MI to show that the new changes work any better and those on the ground who have the misfortune of implementing them widely acknowledge this new regime to be an unutterable disaster. The CEO has surrounded herself with a clique of fawning yes-men (who, incidentally, were told that they needed to adjust their moral compasses by the previous CEO!). The changes are short-sighted and are being implemented purely to make the executive look good in the short-term. The rhetoric around the need for change is that we need to be financially sustainable which few disagree with. But it is clear that the case fee has been kept unduly low - a very modest increase of a few pounds would solve our financial woes, but there seems no appetite for this at the board level. Perhaps due to political pressure? Also telling is the lack of minutes of the board meetings - none have been published since March 2016. Have they stopped being published or have the board simply lost interest?