Ok, imagine the scenario.  You’re told on Friday morning at 9.35 a.m to go to the 7^th floor and meet Siobhan, your HR generalist.  Only HR live on the 7^th floor, not real people.  You go into a meeting room with her and there is Charles, your line manager or maybe Fiona, who is really quite senior in HR but not usually seen during the hours of daylight.  You’re handed a lengthy letter and told that your role is at risk of redundancy.  What do you do?

Answer: try and get as much information out of Siobhan and Charles/Fiona as you can.  What to ask?

1. What is the company doing?  Is it a restructure/rationalization/other reason.
2. Why you?  Crucial – why is your role in the organization no longer needed? 
3. What will happen to your work once you’ve gone?  Will it be divided up amongst remaining people/sent to Bangalore/no longer needed because the business is getting out of that sector?
4. Who else is at risk?  If your role is a unique one and a layer of management is being stripped out of the organisation, this is less relevant.  But, see next one down. What is the selection criteria they are using? 
5. What is the selection criteria they are using? If there are ten in your team and five are being put at risk, how has the company decided you should be placed at risk, but not Tony who sits next to you?  Selection criteria must be objective as far as possible.
6. What is your score against the criteria?
7. How did your comparators score?  Usually HR won’t give you this information because of confidentiality reasons, but you can ask to be given it on an anonymised basis.
8. How many people in your “establishment” are being placed at risk?  If more than 20 or 100 then time limits for consultation apply.  Get suspicious if HR won’t tell you.
9.  What other roles are available?  Redundancy should be the last resort.  Employers should try and exhaust all other possibilities before dismissing you.  Have they thought of pay-cuts or unpaid leave, or could they redeploy you to another part of the business, making use of your transferable skills?
10. What is the timescale for the process?  When will the decision be made?  When will we have the next meeting?

Finally, the 11^th question: where can I get some good legal advice on my rights?  Answer: here.

I can help you with all these issues, or advise you if you’ve been given a compromise agreement.  Please call me on 0207 464 8433 or at michaelscutt@dalelangley.co.uk.

Related posts:

1. Just been made redundant? Don’t forget …
2. I'm being made redundant – what do I do?
3. It's Christmas – I'm being made redundant!

10 questions to ask if you’re made redundant originally appeared on Jobsworth by Michael Scutt on 08/10/2009.

A recent case dealt with the obligations on an employer when making redundancies to try and redeploy “at risk” staff into “suitable alternative employment”.  What does this mean though?  In most consultation processes very little effort is often expended by the employer into fulfilling its obligations.

It  now seems clear that ANY suitable alternative employment in the employer’s group should first be offered to an “at risk” employee before it is offered to any not-at-risk employees.  Employers will inevitably argue that job x was not suitable and there will then need to follow an analysis of just how suitable or otherwise the “at-risk” employee was.  It should not matter that there was a better not-at-risk candidate.  Furthermore, the issue of retraining might arise and the employer could find themselves in difficulty if it failed to recognise this.  For instance, an Equities Analyst covering Europe could surely move across to cover North America, if such a vacancy existed?  It doesn’t seem to happen.

The upshot of this is that “at risk” employees should be preferred above all other candidates when consideration is given to filling internal vacancies.  For pregnant “at risk” employees they also have an added layer of protection because she has the right to be automatically offered any suitable and appropriate vacancy.

Related posts:

1. Redundancy – what's going on?
2. Redundancy: Not the End of the World

Redundancy & Redeployment originally appeared on Jobsworth by Michael Scutt on 18/12/2008.