Can we do Redundancy with Respect?

Welcome to Discuss HR, the HR blog written by Human Resources UK. 

Annabel Kaye returns today to follow up her tale of two TUPEs to discuss why its time for HR to improve their redundancy process. (Ed Scrivener)

Can we do Redundancy with Respect?

Most HR practitioners have to organise redundancies, and in the last three years over 2.7million people have been made redundant.  Whilst we all do the best we can to make the process as palatable as possible, I have been presented with some feedback from Elaine Hopkins (the Redundancy Crusader) which has really made me re-evaluate my own approach to redundancy and made me conclude that HR’s own focus on compliance and on process is often creating an unnecessarily cruel process for many individuals.

From her research, and from my own experience on our hotline desk, we both know that there is an uncomfortable gap between best practice, the ACAS code, and what is going on in reality.     When we remove from this discussion redundancies that are designed and implemented by people who are not in HR (or employment law), we are still left with some uncomfortable thoughts and experiences.

Many people regard being made redundant as a failure on their part – a rebuke akin to being dismissed for poor performance or misconduct.  There are people who were made redundant a long time ago who still feel traumatised by that experience.  If you don’t believe me, ask around (and don’t ask HR people, ask ordinary people who don’t know how it is meant to be).  We are plainly doing something with how we consult and communicate to be leaving people with this impression.  It doesn’t help that many line managers want to ‘tuck in’ poor performers into a redundancy exercise, which can reinforce that redundancy is about not being up to the mark.

The way we sometimes structure consultation and selection meetings, with checklists and HR minders to make sure nothing inappropriate is said, can leave individuals feeling (quite rightly so) that no dialogue, no conversation, has taken place.    Despite the ‘tick the box’ part of the checklist which says “Have you any questions…?”, there is no real opportunity to digest the information, ask questions, absorb the ideas, or respond.    It is admirable that managers have support and guidance and frameworks.  But this can lead to a ‘tick the box’ dismissal ― where you might as well hand the person at risk of redundancy the checklist, ask them to read it, tick the boxes, and then dismiss themselves.

Whilst it is vital to ensure that the basics are communicated, we need to work more with managers on helping them model having real conversations – in other words, we should support a proper communication process.  We in HR have a tendency to hijack the communication in the interests of compliance.   We all know there are some line managers who are liable to go off track, but treating everyone in this way is a disproportionate response and causes emotional harm.  Where manager and employee have a good and long standing working relationship, it can be isolating and shocking for the individual to be faced with their manager being restricted to reading off a checklist. 

Many organisations automatically send people at risk onto gardening leave and remove their email and data log ons.  Whilst there may be situations where this is necessary if there is a real risk to the business, the routine use of this can result in a consultation process that looks a bit like this.

• “Hey Jenny can I talk to you?”
• “Sure”
• “Mm, I have to read through this checklist now, sit down and don’t ask any questions till I tell you to. Don’t look at me while I am reading this through – eye contact makes me nervous.
• OK I have read all this stuff to you.  Have you got any questions?  No?  That’s good.
• Go home now and we will see you again in a week’s time.”

Jenny is then escorted off site by security and goes home to find all corporate communication (from email log ons to phones and data access) has been cut off.

I am not making this up!  Some people are telling us stories of trying to hand over active and urgent work to their colleagues while the computer progressively locked them out of  areas they needed to access . . . and then their phone got cut off.

We have work to do to look at how we communicate with individuals now that we are in a world where job security is fading fast.  How can we ask our employees to engage with us if they know their colleagues have been subject to this?  What is the point of all that talent management and employee engagement if this is the end game for some?

Perhaps it is time we integrated our ‘on boarding’ with our ‘off boarding’ and set ourselves some standards that we can all be proud of.   Meanwhile the tweet deck is on and social media is out there, as HMVdiscovered to their cost.   The answer isn’t around shutting down social media access or around reducing consultation periods so we can just get to the end more quickly, it’s around upping our game.

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Discuss HR is the HR blog written by members of Human Resources UK, the 10,000 member strong LinkedIn group dedicated to the HR professionals in the UK.  Discuss HR is published twice weekly and looks to take an insightful, informative and sometimes irreverent view on the world of HR – all with the purpose of generating a discussion.

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