Hello everyone, I hope you're having a good weekend.

On my way back from Sunday shopping today, I bumped into a friend from a charity in the same sector as mine. He's on flexible furlough, where he's been working from home 2 days a week part-time since July. His charity is slowly getting as many people back to work, even though their leased office is staying closed. There have been a lot of redundancies, with some of the recently hired staff not being furloughed at all because they didn't have 2 years under their belts to get employment rights.

My friend told me he got upset because as soon as everything got locked down in March, HR at his charity immediately contacted all of their volunteers who had a computer at home saying they needed their help more than ever with various things to keep the charity running during lockdown because the people who had been doing those jobs were now furloughed and couldn't do any work for this charity.

As expected, this charity's volunteers went above and beyond to help out however they could, doing everything from data entry to gift aid reconciliation to applying for funding and grants. They've had mixed success, but anything at all was better than nothing. This charity were so grateful to their loyal volunteers that a couple weeks ago, their HR sent a compulsory HSA risk assessment to all of these volunteers who had been using a computer at home. Several months later than it should have been done, because lockdown happened back in March.

It might surprise everyone here to know that not a single volunteer passed the working from home risk assessment. My friend didn't think HR should have asked volunteers to work from home in the first place. This charity's HR then contacted these volunteers to tell them that because their charity shops were reopening soon, to contact the shop manager and arrange some volunteer shifts after they've had their mandatory PPE and social distancing training to keep themselves and their customers safe as everything goes back to before lockdown. 

My friend is so upset that his charity has treated their volunteers as badly as they have, especially during lockdown when volunteers were expected to adhere to strict funding deadlines, and especially to those volunteers who were able to use their experience to generate income for the charity as the people who usually did this weren't legally allowed to. It seems to him that every volunteer, especially those of retirement age, is nothing more than a body to fill a space in a charity shop staff rota because of how they've been treated by this charity during the darkest hours.

My friend knows that people like him badly need to return to their jobs, but with so many of his former colleagues now redundant, or about to be made redundant when the furlough scheme ends in October, the charity is now deficient in many key skills that will be badly needed really soon, like mental health counselling, physical health awareness, suicide prevention and other important jobs. He believes the charity he works for have cut off their nose to spite their face, showing how poorly managed it is and in his opinion has been for so much of his time there. And if that wasn't bad enough, his management team also have to find new offices because their lease lapses early next year and the landlord won't let them renew it.