Are you a company about to make redundancies?

Deciding who to make redundant

Never an easy choice. The payroll is usually the biggest single expense in any company - your business needs to survive and to help this happen, horrid decisions have to be made. Do you carry on with the numbers you have in your workforce hoping things will improve, knowing that if they don’t, everyone will be at risk of losing their jobs? Or, do you make the harrowing choice to cut your wage bill to the bone, so that the company has a better chance of survival?

Before pressing the redundancy buttons, you absolutely must get legal advice as the last thing your company needs is to be hauled in front of an employment tribunal. You should consider stopping overtime and retraining / redeploying your existing staff. You need to have a consultation period to tell employees what is happening, why redundancies are being made and how you are selecting people for the redundancy. You could offer voluntary redundancy as a first step and then an individual consultation which must spell out why you are making the redundancy and why that person has been selected.

For the employees, redundancy is a very traumatic experience and so this needs to be handled with the utmost sensitivity whilst following legal and your own HR procedures. Redundancy also creates a negative environment with your remaining employees who may still feel that their own jobs aren’t safe and guilty that they have retained their jobs while their friends/colleagues are now in dire straights. Morale, productivity and motivation will all be affected by the changes redundancy brings and it will take some time before things settle.

In deciding who to make redundant, you will have to take a lot of factors into consideration, including:
• How long the individual has worked for you
• What their attendance / disciplinary records show
• The skills, competencies, experience and qualifications they have
• How they performed in their duties

It’s common sense, but what you can’t do is select people for redundancy based on their gender, sexuality, race, religion or because they are pregnant. If you have another role in your company that is suitable for the person you have selected for redundancy, and they choose not to take that role, then you are then under no obligation to pay redundancy.

The first meeting should be quite short, you need to get to the point because the employee will be nervous and in turmoil. You may get all sorts of emotions or reactions, some people just go quiet, others will be understandably angry. Stay calm, measured, supportive and show compassion.

You must handle the redundancy conversation with care, show empathy and be clear. Provide the employee with information on how to respond to job adverts and on the resources available to:
• get their CV looking good - http://www.hotjobsinhospitality.com/making-a-cv.cms.asp
• and on interview techniques - http://www.hotjobsinhospitality.com/interview-tips.cms.asp

Once you have made the difficult decision on whom you will be letting go and you have followed all the correct procedures, you must also allow the employees to go out on interviews during paid working in their notice period.

Your remaining workforce needs to be reassured, so you should gather them and explain why you have taken these steps and show how valuable their role is to the future of your company. Make sure that your managers display a positive attitude and are able to cope with the changes.