Blog: HR Periscope

A reality that cannot be denied is that 2009 will at the very least start of with a number of economic uncertainties and there is no doubt that the British economy has definitely slowed down. As a consequence, many businesses will go into survival moment and automatically be planning to cut jobs in order survive. This may help in the short term, but in the longer term when things pick up again organisations that do so may find themselves struggling to find the people with the right skills to support their businesses picking up.

On the other hand in spite of the economic climate, there will be people who start of new businesses this year that will actually thrive. This suggests that there are still a lot of opportunities out there for businesses that are able to identify them. I would therefore suggest that you start of the New Year by doing the following:

· Review your business objectives and activities, considering what areas of your business have been the most profitable and are likely to be the most profitable going forward. Consider if there are new areas that you can expand into that would be specifically beneficial at this point in time. If you have difficulty in working this out for yourself, speak to a few of you current customers and try and get an indication of what their requirements are likely be going forward.

· Develop a skills (or competency) framework to match your business requirements. You’ll find this useful to your organisation in the future as well.

· Do a skill’s audit for your staff you may be surprised at the latent or hidden skills that some of your staff members may have that may be crucial for both this period and the future of your organisation even if their current roles become redundant.

· Make changes to your staffing structure accordingly. At this point you may find that there are employees for whom there is no longer a role within the organisation or too many employees for a specific role. If this is the case you may have to bring in redundancy procedures, but you can do so knowing that you can clearly justify your actions.

· Even at this stage it is possible to consider other options to redundancy with employees such a reduced hours or a (temporary) salary decrease as long as this does not take employees below the minimum wage.

· If there are other organisations that you have a good relationship with there is a possibility that you can also share the time/services of staff or even second them for a period to the ‘sister’ organisation.

· There may also be employees who would like to take time of work to go on a training course. This may be a good time to support them in doing so.

Ultimately, be creative! However, If you are going to have to go for redundancies or consider any other option such as those mentioned above, communicate regularly with your employees and keep them abreast with the options, be aware that it will be essential that you first seek legal advice and that employee terms and conditions will need to be updated to reflect the changes made.

Susan Popoola
Conning Towers
HR Transformation & Talent Management
Leveraging the Power of People

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Labels: Human Resources, redundancies, Talent Management, Workforce Planning