Tag Archives: management legitimacy

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.
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On Daybooks

TimelessTime consultants have represented many firms at tribunal. We’ve supported principals and managers in cases when the firm was in the right but the plaintiff employee got the upper hand simply because of procedural errors on the part of managers in the firm.
There’s often one simple cause – principals and managers don’t write things down. They don’t document the various discussions with employees. They don’t prepare for meetings and document what they hope to achieve, then don’t document what they actually said and what was actually done.
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Just Culture, Just Management

On the Home Page of our web site at www.timelesstime.co.uk we mention two concepts desirable in a firm: ‘just management’ and a ‘just culture’. What on earth are they? Are they simply esoteric states that it’s fun to talk about but never achieve? Or are they something tangible that every principal of every SME should strive for?

This brief blog discusses these two concepts.

First some definitions. Management’s role is to manage. Successful managers manage with the blessing of their staff. They gain legitimacy thought the culture they create and their appointment to a senior position by the board. That’s not to say that there’s a sort of democracy, just to acknowledge that to give direction and demand that stuff happens needs legitimacy. In an environment where folk chose to work in a firm, legitimacy is essential or folk walk or worse, they simply ignore the instruction. Managers are facilitators. They orchestrate and lead change. But they have to have their staff with them or they are pushing water up hill.

Culture is the climate that needs to be in place for management to gain that right to manage. It’s also the group’s skills, knowledge, attitudes, values and motives. If all the aforementioned are positive, legitimacy comes easy. If not, the manager must adopt a different approach, departing the ideal of facilitator and orchestrator and taking on a directive and authoritarian approach This leads to a breakdown of the culture and a weakening in the manager’s ability to effect change. Whilst it might be OK in Gordon Ramsay’s kitchen, such aggressive methods become wearing after a short time.
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