A woman at the centre of an employment dispute found her first few weeks at Corrections “confusing” and didn’t understand who she was supposed to report to. Photo / Greg Bowker
A woman believes she was misled into accepting a role that didn’t exist after the Department of Corrections used an 11-year-old job listing that didn’t match the actual position on offer.
The woman took Corrections to the Employment Relations Authority with a claim that she’d been unjustifiably dismissed from her job and that her former employer had used a restructuring process to terminate her employment following a long-lasting and unresolved employment relationship problem.
During the hearing, Corrections acknowledged that “job descriptions often do not reflect the actual role and tasks of the job”.
The woman, who has name suppression, has now been awarded nearly $60,000 in compensation.
She is a professional public servant who has spent many years working in government. She told NZME she’s never seen other agencies advertise what she labelled a “ghost vacancy”.
“You just don’t do that… it’s mind-boggling,” she said.
“All I did was see an advert for a job, applied for it and got it, then everything that happened turned out to be my fault.
“It’s three years of my life I’ll never get back.”
According to the authority’s recently released decision, the woman applied for a job at Corrections before the Covid pandemic struck.
Some seven months prior to that listing going up a manager in the department forwarded a proposal for more support in his team, which was declined. His boss suggested the manager simply use a vacant business service adviser role to fill the hole in his team as it was the closest match in terms of salary.
Corrections’ intention was that 80 per cent of the role would be spent managing contracts. The other 20 per cent would be spent carrying out support tasks for another branch of Corrections.
The actual job description Corrections used was recycled from a job listing from 11 years earlier and didn’t reflect the tasks and duties that would be required in the role.
This was done because it was difficult to create new roles within Corrections’ organisational structure or to amend job descriptions that were already established, according to the authority’s ruling.
The manager who needed to fill a hole in his team said full disclosure would need to be made to a successful candidate about why the role didn’t match the job description and why it “was not as advertised”.
The woman was interviewed by a panel of Corrections managers.
“The panel told [her] that they had not expected someone with her skills to apply for the role, but [she] did not leave the interview with a sense that the role was different to the job description.”
The woman who eventually took the role was hired and started in January 2019.
However, she found her first few weeks at Corrections “confusing” and didn’t understand who she was supposed to report to with multiple different people allocating her work with no context.
Corrections staff within different departments also seemed unclear about who she should report to.
It became “messy” within weeks and the woman said she did not understand what was required of her, had trouble reconciling the work she was doing with the advertised job description and had no one to talk to about it.
Within a month of starting she raised issues with one of her managers about where she fit in the team and what exactly her job was.
The decision says she clashed with a woman she sat next to who wasn’t her boss but would assign her tasks. This woman felt the new employee was overstepping her and causing confusion in the regions about who was responsible for certain tasks.
It came to a head in April after an altercation between the two women resulting in the new employee moving out of her usual desk.
Confusion about what the woman’s role actually was continued with her several managers trying to find work for her to do. She would refuse to do tasks that seemed to her to be too administrative. She was eventually removed from the operational procurement team which originally constituted 80 per cent of her workload.
In August, the woman was offered a variation to her employment contract which set out tasks and duties the regional manager considered reflected the actual role Corrections expected the woman to do. The woman refused to sign the offer and contacted her union.
Several meetings were then held with the woman and her managers which ultimately concluded with her declining the offer on the basis that the role constituted primarily administrative duties whereas she thought she’d been hired for a more-senior advisory role.
When the country went into a Covid-19 lockdown in 2020, staff were required to work from home. Corrections told the ERA the woman did “little to no work” during that time.
By April 2021, the regional manager considered disestablishing the woman’s role and by February of the next year she was let go.
The woman took Corrections to the Employment Relations Authority with a claim that she’d been unjustifiably dismissed from her job and that her former employer had used a restructure process to terminate her employment following a long-lasting and unresolved employment relationship problem.
Corrections made submissions to the authority that the restructure which led to the disestablishment of the woman’s role was justified and was done for genuine business reasons. They said it also saved them up to $57,000 per year in salary costs.
In the hearing, and noted by the authority in its ruling, Corrections said that “job descriptions often do not reflect the actual role and tasks of the job – especially administrative roles.”
It also admitted that the job description did not align with the actual role and by way of explanation said there wasn’t enough work under the role they advertised and much of the work could be carried out by lower-level administrators.
Deputy chief executive for people and capability at Corrections, Richard Waggott, told NZME the agency wasn’t going to appeal the decision and was arranging payment of the compensation.
He said creating a new role or amended position at Corrections required a robust process to be followed by the relevant managerial staff.
“It is critical that we have a level of scrutiny to ensure the appropriate use of public money on salaries, but we acknowledge we also need to ensure staff are supported to create suitable job advertisements in a timely manner,” he said.
“It is my expectation that any job advertised reflects the actual requirements of the role as close as possible and that the day-to-day responsibilities are clearly communicated to candidates ahead of any appointment process.”
Waggott said that since the woman’s recruitment there have been a number of changes and improvements to its hiring process.
The woman told NZME she didn’t apply to be an administrator and doing work such as writing minutes for meetings or scheduling appointments was a 15-year step-back in terms of her skillset.
“I’m a public servant through and through… but I wouldn’t have applied for an administrator role,” she said.
“When you work at a place like Corrections it’s for the communities and for the people. It’s about helping people and implementing change.”
At one point she said she had nine different taskmasters and kept feeling like she was just getting caught in the “crossfire” between them.
She also said she felt “gaslit” after being told one thing by one manager, only to then be questioned why she was doing the task she’d just been assigned.
Authority member Natasha Szeto said Corrections did not have a genuine reason for dismissing the woman.
“Corrections knew before it employed the woman that the job description did not accurately represent the role and tasks that it was recruiting for,” she said in her ruling.
“Corrections managers thought it would be sufficient to be clear with the successful candidate about what their role was, and how the job description differed from the role in practice. It failed to provide this role clarity.”
Szeto said that the “split role” expectation was not communicated to the woman until after she’d been hired and ruled that the woman’s feeling she had been “palmed off” was justified.
“The woman had been working in a state of employment limbo with an uncertain role and reporting lines for a period of over two years at the time that it was proposed to disestablish her role,” Szeto said.
“I find that Corrections was not active or responsive to the woman’s concerns from the beginning of her employment.
“Corrections has now said that it employed her into a role that technically did not exist in the organisational structure, but this was only admitted as part of the authority’s investigation process.”
Szeto said the impact on the woman had been significant and that she found it difficult to move forward from her experience of three years at the agency.
In her ruling, Szeto awarded the woman $36,500 for six months’ lost wages following her dismissal and $23,000 in compensation for humiliation and loss of dignity.
Jeremy Wilkinson is an Open Justice reporter based in Manawatū covering courts and justice issues with an interest in tribunals. He has been a journalist for nearly a decade and has worked for NZME since 2022.
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