Up in the air

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I am just like George Clooney*.

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It may not be the most obvious comparison but let me explain.  

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As my business and team have grown, we are working with more established businesses and have tended to move away from simply drafting a first employment contract for a company.  Don’t get me wrong, we will do that (happily), but it has been a natural shift.  

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As clients have grown their own businesses, they will often have a need to question the structure they have in place - this is only natural.  What worked when you set up your business may not work as you grow it.  

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Change is coming

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Change is difficult to get right.  Employees can be stuck in their ways and like routine.  The longer they have worked for an organisation which hasn’t changed, the more reticent they will be to the proposed changes.  

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One of the biggest changes that a business can go through is a redundancy programme.  It may be that roles are no longer adding value to the business or that the business needs to streamline its processes or cut waste. Whatever the reason, having to tell members of your team that they may be losing their job is one of the hardest things you will ever do as a business owner, especially if these are employees that have been with you since the start.

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More and more organisations are taking the opportunity to outsource this process, and this is where my business can help.  We are seeing a surge in change projects at the moment and, whilst the business has been built on an exclusively retained model, change projects are bread-and-butter for me.  They are the reason I got into HR initially.

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The Change Curve

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When your business is facing change, you obviously need someone who can keep you legally complaint - this is an absolute given. However, you also need someone who can take the emotion out of it all.  The employees are going to go through their own emotions at different stages, which is known as the Change Curve**.

This is so fundamentally important.  Your employees are all individuals.  They will not all react the same and it isn't uncommon to move forward and backward across the curve.  Eventually, they will get to the end of it because, however long it takes, there will need to be an acceptance of the situation (as it is unlikely to change).

It can be so easy to try and make the situation seem something it isn't.  Redundancy requires a period of consultation which needs to be meaningful.  It can be so easy for this to give false hope because officially the situation isn't confirmed until the consultation period closes.  In my experience, it is very rare for anything to change during consultation (after all, if you weren’t sure this was the right decision for your business, you wouldn’t be doing it).  You don’t want to upset your staff but false hope ultimately won't help (and indeed could worsen the situation).  

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I have done projects recently where the entire business has closed down and was made insolvent. Consultation was still required but the situation wasn’t going to change - the business didn’t have any money.

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The right process to follow is to bring all the affected individuals together at the same time and deliver the same message.  I usually read from a script to make sure nothing is missed.  If you have staff that aren't in the business because of holiday/sickness/non-working day etc, then make sure you get to them as soon as they are back and deliver the same message.  For maternity leave, I would suggest reaching out to the individual and making them aware there was an important development they needed to know about and be guided by them how and when they want to be updated.  

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It isn't personal

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Redundancies are never personal as it is the roles that are made redundant.  Of course the employees will take it personally though so it is important that communications are consistent, legally compliant and not open to interpretation.

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With so much to remember, and significant risks if it goes wrong, it is no wonder that business owners seek help with this.  They want it dealt with professionally whilst ensuring that their company and the employees are taken care of.  We can deal with everything, from the initial project plan and business case to the letters and meetings that need to be held and then the ‘post change’ dialogue with the remaining employees to keep them engaged.  Of course it is not a comfortable process or an easy one.  It is likely there will be tears and there may be anger. All of this needs to be dealt with. We are experts at this and will make sure it is done right.  

Do you have change projects that need to be dealt with in your business?  If so, please get in touch. We would love to support you.

*The George Clooney reference: this relates to a 2009 film called Up In The Air where he played ‘a corporate downsizing expert’.  Effectively he turned up at a business, told the employees about the changes, and then left. Obviously it was a film and everything was done in a far more clinical way than it should have been, but the basic principle is the same: sometimes you just need to get things done however unpleasant they are

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**To read more about the Change Curve, click here: https://www.indeed.com/career-advice/career-development/change-curve.

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