Cardiff County Council reviews about "manager"

Horrendous treatment of staff, there is a guy that has worked there for years who preys on the girls and when reported, is protected by managers. Very dangerous place to work in my opinion. You are disposed of if you stand up for yourself, the way you are treated. Your contract will not be renewed and the fact that they HIDE scary predator behaviour when reported by so many is such an awful trait.

Managers not interested in developing staff

Old business analysis ways of working

It can get very loud and the Welsh government keep cutting funding

The first thing that hits you when you enter Willcox House in south Cardiff is the smell of the toilets, it’s all downhill from there. As a new recruit you might want to see an organisation chart of your dept., or the council even, well tough luck there aren’t any. Perhaps business process descriptions???? 😊😊😊 you’re joking. Well you might find out more on the induction course, except there isn’t one. Training is basically picking up the job from those around, which is how to permanently embed bad practice and inefficiency. IT systems are a ragbag of the monstrous SAP, various out of date packages and uncoordinated bespoke applications built and maintained on a sort of hobby basis by one or two individuals who hopefully will never leave or fall under a bus. Still, maybe your managers will help? Unlikely, between my post and the council cabinet member responsible, there were four managers, two of whom I never saw in a year of working there, as for the chief executive I visualised him as some wizard of oz figure, although I never made it to the emerald city.

Some inevitable bureaucracy contributes to less agile service delivery than in private sector

- Application process is very awkward and lengthy (as is the case with most public-sector organisations), you have to write out endless essays about your experience / knowledge on a specified topic all while being vague and not being clear about what is being asked for. I applied for a few internal ICT vacancies whilst trying to promote but was turned down each and every time because I had not completed the application form correctly despite it being very obvious based on my career history and knowledge / skills that I could have done the role I was applying for. Why can’t CVs just be accepted? - Was told off for trying to help out other departments within ICT for work and trying to “go the extra mile” in my own role to make everyone’s life easier, the work ethic very much favours staff who “do the bare minimum amount of work to get by” - If teams within ICT make changes on the network and break something (which triggers a large amount of phone calls / emails to ICT), it is the Service Desk team who have to deal with the angry end-users complaining and shouting as the specialist teams within ICT do not take communication from the users directly - While documentation and SLAs exist within ICT, end-users do not care about this and will endlessly chase their support tickets until it gets resolved (and will escalate to their manager / director as high as they need to go in order to get their ICT problem fixed). There is little to no enforcement of “putting your foot down” to end-users and as above it is the Service Desk who has to deal with the brunt of the angry emails / phone calls, not the teams who are not resolving tickets within SLAs - Noticeable drop in work performance output of various ICT teams if their senior / manager is off work - Staff across the authority are employed with little regard to their IT knowledge, the amount of staff who do not know what / where the Windows Start Menu is located is unreal! - More applies to the Council overall but endless issues with staff of all levels doing the absolute bare minimum amount of work, this would not be tolerated at all within the private sector and it is crazy how little work certain staff get away with and face no consequence whatsoever. There a few staff who are hard workers, anyone who has come from a private sector background will see straight away the culture difference between private / public sector attitudes to work - Witnessed departments buying unnecessary expensive computers and Apple mobile devices toward the end of the financial year because “we need to spend their entire budget before the next financial year”, are these people aware that this is taxpayer’s money being flushed down the drain? - ICT department isn’t really “growing” and the only way to move up is when someone leaves or promotes and their position becomes vacant, be prepared to stay here for years and years if you intend to move up (unless are lucky to enter a mid to senior grade position)

Lack of training and support for manager/supervisor duties

Inability to manage correctly or well due to three manager changes in a 12 month period. Lack of team means inability to allocate correctly. Overall job different from job description. Pay does not equal amount of work completed.