Three years ago Jo was working as a regional business manager at a large retail chain when she was told she had to bring her entire team to the company’s head office in for a meeting. It turned out that the business was struggling, some stores were going to be closed and everybody was potentially up for redundancy.
‘Though I was a manager, I didn’t know anything until that day,’ Jo, now 37, says. ‘I had been working there for 8 years and knew my colleagues well, had built friendships with many of them, so the initial upset was hard. People were crying and screaming and I was accused of knowing in advance. Of course, if I had I wouldn’t have been able to say anything anyway. It was a really horrific time.’
Finding out you’re being made redundant can be a massive shock. It can have a detrimental effect on both your mental and physical health, as well as on your sense of self-worth. But it’s not only those who are being made redundant who can feel the emotional toll – the people delivering the news can have a difficult time too.
For Jo, her management role meant she was told which stores would close following the big announcement, but then it fell on her to tell people they were being made redundant. ‘I had people shouting at me, walking off part-way through a conversation and being rude at various times,’ Jo admits. ‘Things regularly got heated and I felt a lot of people couldn’t understand I was going through the same process myself (she applied for voluntary redundancy, but it was rejected). I wish I could say I had a lot of really great coping mechanisms, but I don’t. It’s just incredibly emotive when people lose their jobs.’
‘While it is obviously an emotional time for the affected employees, I have also felt stressed by the process,’ HR consultant Catherine, 36, says. ‘I get worried I haven’t covered every angle or that I have missed some information that will be vitally important during consultation. There can also be the upsetting, uncomfortable sessions when you have a tearful individual in front of you.
‘Nobody goes into HR wanting to make people redundant, but you need to be a certain type of person. If you’re somebody who is very emotional and you get upset in front of the other person then that is not helpful for the person being made redundant. You have to have a bit of a front and remain professional during those conversations.’
Catherine has worked in HR for 15 years, and says that out of all of the challenges that come with working in that field, the one you ‘take home with you’ is when you enter into a redundancy or company restructure situation. The first time she did this when she was 24, and five years ago she then had to make members of her own team redundant. ‘It was people I’d known for nearly 10 years – it was part of a restructure, so they could have applied for other jobs but on a lower level, so they didn’t want to do that,’ she says. ‘By the end of the process they had got their head around it, but they weren’t happy about me taking their job away – and that’s how they saw it. The decision was made by a director but it went to me to tell them, so it looked like it was my fault.’
Although redundancies can seem personal, it’s not you yourself, but your job that is being made redundant. But what makes a company decide to go down this route in the first place? ‘It’s never a case of ‘we don’t want this person, let’s make them redundant’ – in the eyes of a tribunal that wouldn’t be redundancy anyway, it would be a performance issue,’ Catherine says. ‘Sometimes cost is a driver, but redundancies could be down to other factors, such as putting a team centrally so you no longer need regional hubs, or putting a new structure in place to make the business work more efficiently.’
UK law usually dictates how long consultation processes take. Usually, for companies with more than 100 affected people, you have to have a 90-day consultation by law, whereas if it’s a single redundancy then it’s a ‘reasonable consultation’ that might take something closer to four weeks. ‘It’s frustrating for people as it can feel like a long time – but the reason it takes so long is that it’s still a proposal at the initial stage,’ Catherine says. ‘When you enter into consultation you haven’t made the final decision at that point that the role is redundant, it’s an option you have to tell employees as part of the information and consultation regulation. Having a long time allows you to give all the affected individuals the information that they need, and perhaps offer them a suitable alternative if there is one.’
The way redundancies are decided can vary from company to company. London-based Daisy, 28, was working as a HR manager for a department store in Sydney last year when she had to make 23 people redundant. This was done using a ‘skills assessment’. ‘We rated the employees on a robust set of criteria, then used that to identify the poorest-performing ones,’ she says. ‘However, there were various legal obligations we had to consider before actually enacting it. The whole process took around five months – we had a core group of unionised employees who refused to accept it for a while, so that made the consultation take longer.’
Daisy says one of her biggest concerns was that the store was based in a small community, and a lot of people had long tenure with the company in comparison to her. ‘I was very conscious, especially of my young age and the fact I was English,’ she says. ‘In the end, none of that was ever brought up by the affected employees, but I was very sensitive in the manner that I delivered the news. My manager was really helpful in preparing me for it, and recognising the toil it can take. For me, preparation was key.’
As for Jo, she finally had her voluntary redundancy approved in 2015 and left the struggling chain. After, she reconnected with some of her former colleagues, who got back in touch and apologised for their behaviour during the process. ‘They’re a lot happier in their current jobs, and so successful,’ she tells me. ‘Though I was demonised at the time for being the one to say the bad news, they now know it wasn’t my fault.’ Jo says the experience did, however, put her off working for a large-scale company – so she retrained as a florist and now runs her own business, Beards and Daisies (www.beardsanddaisies.co.uk).
‘Redundancy seems scary and terrible at first, but it’s a chance to change direction and do something new,’ she adds. ‘So for anyone going through it, I’d look beyond the immediate disappointment and sadness, and instead focus on the next career opportunities that will come your way.’
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