Christine Hallett
On the same day that I lodged my formal grievance against my manager, I emailed the Principal to alert her to the seriousness of the situation which had been on going for several years but didn't seem to be taken seriously. The Principal holds the most senior role in a University, and I was making a desperate plea for help in the hope she would ensure that the issue would be handled properly.
Here's the email I sent to CH. Despite the alarming contents and attached grievance statement, I received no response from the Principal. Days earlier, she had sent all staff a message to say that the University was strongly committed to ensuring that we could all work free from such behaviour. The impression I received was that her statement was false and hypocritical, and that she was part of the problem.
Below is the message that the Principal would have had us all believe. However, the reality is that there is no real commitment to protect staff from bullies. My union reps are aware that Stirling University has one of the worst records for bullying in the UK.
Towards the end of 2009, staff were asked to complete a survey on several issues which included bullying. It was interesting that this survey followed soon after two rounds of Voluntary Severance whereby certain members of staff were offered a year's salary to give up their jobs. KE is one of roughly seven Programmers, which means she represented about 14% of the programming resource. She was desperate to take VS, but she was told by MT that no IS employees outwith the COLT team would be offered VS. Later, I registered an interest in VS, and was duly offered it. KE was furious with MT for having misled her. I was a full time DBA and had a colleague who worked part time as a DBA. This meant that I represented 67% of the DBA resource. Auditors had strongly recommended that the DBA role be covered by more than one person for security reasons. It made no logical sense to offer me a year's salary to leave. There is no doubt that I was being offered VS as a means to cover over my manager's bullying. It is also likely that other targets of bullies were offered VS and that that would have made the results of the survey give the impression that the University's record on bullying is much better than it really is.
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