10/10/2022
I’m really p*ssed off. Here’s why…
I recently saw a Facebook ad from which showed they were sponsored by Eon, a UK Utility Company.
I feel quite angry & upset about this as I used to work Eon & they seriously, negatively affected my mental health.
My personal experience is - they talk about supporting people with mental health challenges but don’t actually back it up with action.
During my time there, I worked on secondment & I became one of the best in the company at creating their operational excellence process guides. I am a hard worker & regularly exceeded my targets. But I still wasn’t seen as good enough.
At one point, I was struggling with my mental health, which their management exacerbated. I end up taking 5 weeks off with stress – directly due to their manager.
I was very honest with them about my challenges. I was in the middle of 8 sessions with a counsellor through their Employee Assistance Programme for extremely negative self-talk. My colleague advised me to request this.
I told them when I felt I wanted to shoot myself in the head to kill off that part of my brain that talked to me so horribly. I was honest with them the day after, when I’d had a particularly distressing session with the counsellor that I had slept badly causing me to be 2 minutes late. I then told the managers that I just needed to get a coffee. When I got back, I was pulled aside to be reprimanded for logging into my phone before I went as it meant I had stolen 15 minutes work from them.
When I got back, they gave me a first written warning as I was on an informal plan for having more than 2 periods off sick in 12 months. The reason given by the manager was because she knew I would work to improve my attendance. So, if I wouldn’t work to improve it, I wouldn’t have been given a written warning? I had to go through the additional stress to appeal and managed to get it overturned.
There were many other things, but this post is long enough already. But they are why I am self-employed!