Subject: Managing staff through tough times, dealing with redundancies and delivering difficult messages

Hi Tara, I’m having to combine two existing roles in the charity I run and therefore make either one of those two people redundant (and train the other to take up the responsibilities of the person made redundant) or make both redundant and recruit someone new who can manage the responsibilities of both roles. I’m unsure as to what would be the best way to go about this and I was wondering whether you might have a checklist of criteria I should consider when making my decision? I just don’t want to miss anything and I want to be as fair as possible. Any advice would be much appreciated. Thanks.

Hi Suzy, thanks for the message!

 If it is a redundancy situation, you will need to follow the right procedure, which involves consulting with the staff who are at risk, & providing the right redundancy package for any leavers. If in doubt, take professional advice to make sure you do the right thing! Remember though that it is actually a job that is made redundant, not a person - the need for the work has either diminished or disappeared altogether, so the jobholder either needs to leave or be redeployed elsewhere in the organisation.

It sounds to me like both roles are being made redundant, as the need for both has decreased, & there is a new role being created that one of the jobholders could potentially be redeployed to. So you can select one for redundancy & one to be redeployed, or open the role to other applicants, go through a selection process & treat both jobholders as applicants for the job in the same way as you treat any external applicants. So potentially both might be dismissed by reason of redundancy, or just one.

When you have to select someone for redundancy from a pool of candidates (even if it's only a pool of 2!) you need to have clear, fair & objective selection criteria - similar to the things you would take int account when selecting someone for a new job. Consider things such as experience, skills, knowledge, personal qualities & attributes etc. - whatever competencies you feel are necessary to perform the role. But avoid anything unfair, such as age, length of service etc. Use a point-scoring system to get the most objective outcome - you could also 'weight' some of the more important factors.

Hope this helps!

Best wishes

Tara

There's quite a bit of guidance on redundancies and restructures on the HRBird website. If you're looking for a toolkit on managing the whole process, we'd recommend the guidance developed by the Pay and Employment Rights Service. However for the occasional question, the Acas helpline gives free advice to employers and employees on 08457 47 47 47.