For those reeling after the Halloween Budget, wondering how you are going to meet your rising costs for next year, knowing there will be hard decisions to make. It can be difficult if you are in HR to know where to turn.

Even discussing redundancy can feel like a betrayal and the concern that employees can be ‘spooked’ and they jump ship is a real one.

So, how can we plan for the worst, and hope for the best?

Planning for Challenges Ahead

The key is to make sure you know what you could be up against, what the rules are and how to stay legally complaint, whilst operating in a way that as best as we can, looks after employee welfare. When you have a hundred other plates spinning and your ‘day job’ to get on with this can feel like an impossible task.

The key to any business change is proper planning. Understanding where your challenges are, your weak spots and where you need resilience in your business. Any consultation with employees should be that a consultation. Not a tick box exercise where you go through the motions on meetings just to ‘get to the end’.

You need to show that you have considered all alternatives, looked at other ways to save money or operate more efficiently. That you can demonstrate that your proposals are thoughtfully put together, detailed in their reasoning and that there is scope for discussion.

Balancing Welfare and Legal Risks

Planning should also extend to how employee welfare will be maintained during the process, what support can be offered and recognising the impact that redundancies can have on individuals.

The elephant in the room of course is the legal risk. Dismissal of one individual carries legal risk, multiple dismissals in a redundancy situation enhances legal exposure almost exponentially, particularly in collective consultation scenarios requiring notifications, elections and extended consultation periods.

Need Further Guidance?

Redundancy is a huge topic; the legal hurdles are many and there are lots of distractions through the process. Working with an external partner such as Hroes can help you not only manage the workload, but also mitigate the legal risk to ensure the process is conducted fairly, in a legally complaint way and to help you ensure that any potential blind spots are covered.

Human nature means that we are proficient and good at what we do regularly. Thankfully for many HR teams redundancies are few are far between, however that can mean that additional support can be invaluable during those challenging times, to ensure not only a smooth process, but also to give you the confidence in the board room, when being asked the difficult or technical questions.