Redundancies

In response to changing economic conditions and your own strategic plans, it is sometimes necessary to downsize your workforce or change your terms of employment. Employment legislation tightly governs the way this can be done, setting out employees’ rights and entitlements and providing them with a degree of protection.

It is critical that you understand and adhere to your legal obligations in any downsizing or redundancy programme. Failure to do so may leave you facing claims for unfair dismissal and/or discrimination, which can be both expensive and damaging to your company’s reputation. For businesses rooted in their local communities, this can be especially disruptive. Managing redundancies involves consulting with appropriate staff, selecting the correct groups of employees that might be vulnerable to redundancy, setting the correct criteria for selecting the at-risk employees and ensuring a fair and open process for communicating and applying the redundancy criteria. Redundancies are never easy and they often, though not always, give rise to bad feeling. Managing the process effectively, communicating clearly and adhering to the appropriate rules will help to ensure that any bad publicity and ill will is minimised – and enable you to demonstrate that you have followed the correct procedure.

We can:

• Ensure that you have a legally compliant procedure to use if redundancies are necessary.
• Assist you in setting up an individual redundancy process for your business’s specific needs.
• Ensure that you comply with the legislative requirements to minimise the risk of any challenge or claim.