The management and leadership of the COVID department is nothing short of woeful. They are incapable of effectively managing a team. They leave private documents of contracts and disciplinaries accessible to all staff and seem to love to gossip about private meetings with other staff and will consistently slander staff behind their backs to other members of the team.
The lack of communication between the management and the staff is laughable, they insist on using whatsapp to communicate (often on your days off) and if you don't, then you are suddenly in the bad books. They are barely in the laboratory but seem to make up their judgments of peoples personalities. I have been there for a year and can count on 1 hand how many times I have spoken to the manager, even less for the head of the company, who I saw once when he installed a coffee machine. They treat people differently, we are supposed to be a team, however, the managers like to over praise one team and under praise another, consistently.
The line manager also sent an email to the entire department, containing negative comments about only a few staff, of which the comments were not true or discussed with those staff, and when confronted, would not see staff in person to apologise, but instead sent an email of apology, which was pathetic and she tried to play it off by saying there was negative comments about everyone as well as positive, a lie.
The Senior management have also lied to staff, promising a £1k NET bonus for not taking any holidays for 3 months, only for staff to find out on pay day, that this was not the case. We had proof they had promised this to us, but they did not like us confronting them and standing up for ourselves, instead they responded with a patronising email.
Things get worse: one day they decided to sack over 50% of our staff, on the day with no warning, leaving them with no job. They said it was due to the low demand for covid tests, but anyone with half a brain could tell you that more covid cases would arise between november and january, and low and behold, TEN days after sacking the staff, cases started to rise and we needed staff, it was like something from a blooper reel of the apprentice. They had no shame in asking the people they sacked to come back, but now we had less staff and more work, this shows how incompetent they are at running a business that they could not forsee this.
During the omicron rise, we were processing over 10000 samples a day, with all staff doing overtime and over 12 hour shifts, which we had to sort out ourselves instead of having a structure provided for us, which was unsustainable. Our line manager likes to avoid making decisions, but likes to point out if a tiny thing is missed during our busiest periods, she didn't ever thank staff for working overtime, instead she complained and told us to get our act together when we had just done 3pm-7am shifts for 4 days in a row, no thanks at all.
Next in the story of Alpha Biolabs ineptitude to run a team, comes a second round of redundancies in 3 months, after promising all staff they were permanent and would be staying to do project work after covid drops off. An excel sheet was again readily available for staff to see, showing a list of people's names in red who were going to be made redundant BEFORE THEY SPOKE TO ANYONE. The then had meetings with people to let them go or stay, if you were let go you had to stay to work your notice period. But YET AGAIN another episode in the comedy series of alpha biolabs management, they told one member of staff that he was staying, only to call him two days later to make him redundant, extremely unprofessional, they even banned him from site for absolutely no reason, other than the fact he had stood up to management and they didn't like it. I won't be staying long, I need a paycheck, but this is a ship that has sank and will be buried thanks to the shocking management.
There are many many many more things to say, it is unfortunate because the actual scientists and admins are good people and hard workers, but the management and senior management is as good as a chocolate teapot.
