Friday 18 August 2023 – What Happens Next? 2

Sitcoms can be very cleverly written (and expertly delivered) but, as a rule, I never feel that they quite capture the dynamics of a workplace that doesn’t feel contrived.  It feels like the writers have never worked in an office before.  Twenty Twelve is probably the exception, and very reminiscent of my own experiences working for local authorities.  Lines such as, “We are where we are and that’s never a good place to be.”, delivered absent-mindedly by Jessica Hynes’s Siobhan Sharpe in a management meeting while playing with her phone thinking it sounded like a cliché-corporate thing to say but was more telling than she meant it to be.  That was quite accurate: managers talking corporate gibberish at one another and not actually achieving anything on behalf of tax-payers before one of them accidently says something truthful thinking it was bromidic parlance.

But The Office never quite felt right when there was actual work for David Brent to do other than entertaining the room.  When a member of staff is transferred to his team, he forgets to add her to the payroll.  His boss, Neil, berates him.  But that wouldn’t happen like that.  Where is HR in all of this?  Line managers don’t notify Payroll when HR transfers staff from one office to another.

Frasier tries roleplaying with a caller lacking the confidence to ask her boss for a pay rise.  In the roleplay, Frasier has her marching into her manager’s office and making an off-the-cuff business case for giving her a pay rise.  Has the workplace ever worked like that?

Siobhan Sharpe making her point stridently even if it is incoherent and vacuous.

Andy in The Detectorists has a new job as an archaeologist which he hates.  “It’s bullshit”, Andy tells his fiancé, “I don’t know what’s going on there.  The site manager doesn’t know what he’s doing.  He’s dead behind the eyes.”  The Site Manager inexplicably disposes of a Roman mosaic that Andy was unearthing.  So Andy resigns.  With no compunction about his own behaviour which provoked it, the manager accepts his resignation.  That is all accurate in my experience of managers.  But, eventually, the Site Manager tells Andy that he had the mosaic removed because the landowners in Dubai won’t let a significant find hold up the construction of their offices.  That’s accurate: the managers pulling in the opposite direction of their own job description to suit private business.  What’s not accurate is managers ever admitting it.  The character just said it to make the plot work.  In real-life workplaces, plotlines are not so predictable and sewn up.

Today, my Assistant Director visited Social Value Portal’s offices to discuss re-purchasing the Portal to monitor social value contributions made by the council’s suppliers.  He didn’t tell me about this but I knew because he also invited an entourage to hear SVP’s sales pitch.  This included the Head of Economic Development Strategy (the AD’s seeming new sidekick), The Economic Development Strategy Officer, and, even more randomly, three project officers from the council’s Mechanical & Engineering Team responsible for commissioning works contracts, and most of them told me.  Most of them called me and asked why they had been invited and why I wasn’t going.  I had to tell them, respectively, I genuinely didn’t know and I didn’t know, although I have my suspicions.  To this, the Strategy Officer (my team-mate), defended the visit by saying that he understood it was a learning exercise.  So I bet him a pint that, not only was this visit arranged with the sole aim of re-purchasing SVP, but that the AD would decide and announce the purchase in the meeting at SVP despite this breaching the council’s, and any public authority’s, procurement regulations and responsibility for accounting for public money.

I have previously told the AD on two separate occasions, and categorically, that Social Value Portal doesn’t work.  We have never used it at the council because it doesn’t work.  We use Excel spreadsheets instead for suppliers to report evidence of their committed social value contributions, which works fine.  Although other local authorities have bought licences for SVP like LBHF had, like LBHF, no other council uses it for monitoring social value contributions.  I know this for two reasons, I told my AD, because: 1) I have spoken to a lot of the Social Value Officers at these local authorities that have a licence with SVP and they told me so and 2) it doesn’t work.

I won the bet.  My colleague now owes me a pint.  “That was the easiest bet I ever won”, I told him.  It was obvious; this is just another case of Jobs for the Boys.  The AD saw someone in his likeness and gave him a contract.  That’s what they do.  That in doing so he has undermined the council’s social value policy so completely (the council can’t manage something it can’t monitor), and for which he is ultimately responsible for delivering, he will deal with later.  But he wasn’t dead behind the eyes, he just didn’t make eye contact with me metaphorically speaking: he didn’t invite me to the meeting because he already knew what my input would be and that could scupper, or at least embarrass, his goal.  But he also won’t just tell me his nefarious goal to tie up this story neatly.  But he has to tell his Social Value Officer something or I won’t know to start using SVP that he just purchased on behalf of our Council Tax-payers.

He Teams-messaged me this afternoon:

“Hi Paul.  Hope all well.  Just to say, I’m about to email SVP to confirm that we’re extending their contract until the end of December.

“I’m aware [my Head of Service for Employment & Skills who reports to my AD] is currently on leave.  Useful if me/you/[Head of Employment & Skills]/[Head of Economic Development Strategy/sidekick] can catch up when he’s back.  If you want to put something in the diary

“In the meantime if you could raise the PO [Purchase Order] as required for the SVP extension.  thanks”

 

I checked: there is no option in SVP’s contract with the council to extend it beyond the initial three years which ended on 31 July.  He is asking me to raise a purchase order without any due process for spending public money to pay a company that he knows (because I told him) has provided nothing for the past three years and doesn’t work.  He didn’t address the fact that I wouldn’t have known that he was even talking to SVP to agree such a thing and is an operational matter and so not a detail that an AD should even get involved with.  But he knows someone from his entourage would have told me.  And he knows that I know that he knows that I know.  And he knows that I know what he has agreed with SVP is both underhand and in breach of the council’s procurement regulations.  And I suspect that he suspects that I suspect the reason he has agreed the contract is corrupt.  He also didn’t say in this message how much he agreed to pay them so how could I raise a PO for that amount?  I replied:

“Sorry [AD], that’s not my job, I wouldn’t know how to do that.”

 

He replied,

“It’s fine.  [The Head of Employment & Skills] will know how to do it when he’s back.”

 

In the meantime, I put a meeting in our calendars for the four of us on 5 September after my manager’s return.  Unlike the Site Manager in The Detectorists, in the meeting, I don’t think the AD is just going to calmly tell me that this is simply corruption.  But, then, what is he going to tell me?  He can’t tell me to use SVP because it doesn’t work and I’ve already told him it doesn’t work so he already knows I know it doesn’t work.  What happens next?  I don’t know what his long game is.  But, unlike with managers in unrealistic sitcoms, I suspect he doesn’t have one and this little adventure in stealing public money is not going to be neatly episodic.  To be continued.

Andy’s Archaeology manager is dead behind the eyes and seemingly has no interest in archaeology whatsoever.  Do we get to find out why before the end of the episode?