Specialist HR guidance can reduce the stress and risks associated with redundancy programmes. A recent example from our prism HR consultancy offering shows how
Like many businesses currently, an owner-managed business was looking to downsize, owing to the impact of Covid-19. With no in-house HR expertise to map out a redundancy exercise, and aware from other businesses of pitfalls around staff morale or failing to follow required processes, they wanted to get some HR support.
They approached the prism HR Consultancy team for help with aspects such
as drafting letters and attending consultation meetings.
Start-to-finish support
One challenge for small employers is knowing how to conduct a redundancy exercise. The prism HR team guided the business through the entire process, from the initial planning stage. For example, we:
- discussed their choice of pools to ensure this crucial part of the process was carefully thought out
- provided scoring sheets and suggested some objective selection criteria, such as basing scoring on documentation (e.g. appraisals) rather than managers’ opinions of individual employees
- attended consultation meetings, taking minutes and providing support to both the managers conducting the meetings and the employees placed at risk of redundancy.
The outcomes
Confident that HR support has enabled them to manage the risks around redundancy, the managers have been able to focus on other pressing matters. In addition, tension has been defused at key points, for example at the consultation meetings, reducing the damage to relationships across the business.
Redundancy is always a challenging process, and no one wanted to have to
go through it here. However, compared with previous exercises experienced by
the team, when they’d had no HR support, they felt the exercise was less
stressful and more manageable.
