Category Archives: Transfer of Undertakings (TUPE)
What the heck is TUPE?
TUPE, the transfer of undertakings regulations, is a minefield. But how did such legislation come about and how does the generalist manager understand its meaning?
Buying a Firm
First, there are three reasons why someone might buy a firm: for the intellectual property (IP) in its products, for access to its markets or for its people and their knowledge and skills. There are firms who make it their business to buy others and strip the assets. A good example is where a firm is bought for its customers and the purchaser uses the newly acquired brand and distribution chain to market its products and increase its turnover. Continue reading →
Making Staff Redundant: top tips for achieving fairness and reducing risk to the firm
Our White Paper Redundancy – get it right! is very popular – 600 visitors have read it this year alone. We’ve also worked with several business over the last few months to implement restructure, which has in many cases resulted in redundancies. And we’ve taken phone calls from employees across the UK who’ve been placed at risk or are being made redundant asking for help and clarification.
Whilst we can’t really help individuals - we only work with employers – it got me thinking. Why are employees phoning us? Does it mean that firms are not running redundancy processes correctly? They’re clearly not TimelessTime clients! Perhaps guidelines are needed to ease the process. Based on that, here are six top tips on handling staff in a redundancy situation.
Continue reading →
Demystifying Mixed Contract Redundancies
Many small firms employ workers on temporary or short term contracts to cover maternity absence or to cope with seasonal demand. And many employ part timers to cope with peaks in the business day or week. Both are ideal ways of managing costs and supporting full-time permanent staff. Both are ideal ways of staffing the firm to match the local market for goods and services. In addition, some also make use of agency workers for quick fix to sudden absence. But what happens when a downturn suggests that some staff need to be made redundant? Who goes and how does the employer decide? Continue reading →
On Business Restructuring
Business restructuring is the catch-all phrase used to describe the series of actions that a firm might take to re-organise its affairs following some management decision to change the course of the business. There are three views often discussed: from the legal perspective, from the finance perspective and from the human resources perspective. Taken alone, they all tend to adopt a hard approach. The lawyers talk of new legal arrangements for the firm and like the accountants they assume the firm is in difficulty. Both assume that if drastic restructuring action is not taken urgently then third perspective action will be inevitable – redundancy following liquidation, merger or buy-out. In every case it’s a boom time for the professional services firms.
But business restructuring is not about the stuff of films. It’s about the normal adjustment that a firm makes to optimise its approach to the market. Continue reading →
