Navigating Necessary Redundancies with Care

You might find yourself one day having to make the difficult decision to make your employees redundant 😢.

According to recent research, the number of planned redundancies in the UK has rocketed by a whopping 54% in the last 12 months leading up to July. That's a significant leap, totalling 237,017 planned job cuts in 2022/23, compared with 153,635 in the previous year.

If you're considering redundancy you need to think about the following things:

1. Plan before you act

Any company considering redundancies should plan meticulously and this includes having a full justification for why the work has dropped off, or moving to another location etc.  The next step is to determine how many redundancies are on the horizon (if there are more than 20 you will need to carry out a collective consultation). Gather all the necessary information that you'll need during the consultation period such as illustrative redundancy schedules, invite letters, Role Profiles and FAQ documents. This pre planning stage is vital because it sets the tone for a structured and transparent process that hopefully prevents employees from appealing due to procedural difficulties.

2. Consultation

When it comes to consultation, this must be meaningful i.e. you can't just tell people that they're redundant and expect them to leave. You need to be transparent with the staff affected about why you're considering this drastic measure, listen to any solutions they may have for preventing any redundancies and seriously consider how those might work. If you are just consulting with one or two people, you could start this on a Monday and issue an outcome on the Friday as long as you have fully consulted, allowed questions and considered all of the options.

With Collective Consultation, i.e. more than 20 redundancies, there is a process set out in law that you must follow. You must elect employee representatives and consult with them as well as consulting with individual employees if they so wish, agreeing with them selection criteria and hoping to come to an agreement on the rationale for the redundancies. The Collective Consultation process must take a minimum of 30 days and if there are more than 100 redundancies planned, then it must take 45 days.

Selection Pools and Criteria

No we're not talking swimming pools here. You are obliged to identify all the people who do like and similar work and put them in a pool together. For example, maybe you're about to move building and you no longer believe you have a receptionist role because the new office is serviced. You may initially think that you only need to make the receptionist redundant, however, when you look at his work you can see that he does a variety of office admin duties. The duties are also completed by other administrators in the building, and the skills used by both the receptionist and the other administrators are transferrable, i.e. they can all type, deliver filing etc. In this case, anyone with those skills and tasks, anywhere in the building would have to be in a selection pool together.

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The selection process is part of the redundancy planning that requires more careful consideration.