Burner account, obviously, but I want to ask HR related questions and I am worried about talking to my own HR department.
So I work for a company based in the south of England, I was a contractor and as a result of the pandemic I went permanent. I live in the far north of the country, hundreds of miles from any office.
For about two years now I have had nothing to do. I get maybe one or two relevant, non-circular emails a week, I attend a short 15 minute meeting most days at 10:00 and my calendar is totally empty for the rest of it. I have a 1:1 with my line manager once a month.
My job is literally to stop the teams icon from going orange. I stand for eight hours a day staring at a wall occasionally moving a mouse to register activity. I am a well regarded specialist in a highly technical discipline, I used to travel all over the world working on interesting projects and building a reputation as being very good at what I do.
I am very highly paid for this, well over £100k, but the lack of any meaningful work, any human contact is having a serious impact on my mental health and it would not be exaggerating to say that I have on occasion considered taking my own life. I spent most days with a tight ball of anxiety, shame and anger trapped in my stomach and throat, fighting the urge to just walk away. I am too young to retire, but also too old to be a viable candidate in today's job market.
I am unable to speak to my manager. Any complaint is immediately turned round back at me framed as a personal failing, it is impossible to have a sensible adult conversation about my situation and lack of anything to do. I have repeatedly asked to be allocated some direct reports and this is always refused.
The reason I have nothing to do is because I am an expensive resource and project managers will not use me. Project budgets are set with the main objective being to eliminate using me as a named resource at any point. We use a system to track allocation of resources and I am unused most of the time. What little time is allocated to me I of course copy over to my timesheets but most of it is bundled into internal meetings or training or anything other than project work, because I don't do any project work.
This whole situation is ludicrous, the company refuses, absolutely, to give me any responsibilities for any staff whilst other managers at my level are swamped. They are paying huge amounts to have a very experienced resource sit around doing absolutely nothing and no project manager in the organisation will use me because I'm too expensive.
So my questions are:
Am I being prepared for redundancy? Is there such a thing as functionally redundant whilst not technically redundant?
Are they hoping I will quit?
What would be the consequences of going to HR at my company and telling them what's going on?