Page 173 - Socially-responsible-restructuring-Effective-strategies-for-supporting-redundant-workers

Socially responsible restructuring
Effective strategies for supporting redundant workers

responsibilities. Even where there is little or no development ahead of
restructuring, guidance-delivery partnerships need strong leadership, cohesion,
and clear synergies, and are best integrated by a client-centred approach to
delivery.
Guidance-based cooperations also need robust task management to support
effective timing, flexibility, quality and responsiveness, which can be critical to
career guidance interventions in restructuring situations. Interagency
cooperation, including multiple sub-contractors and service suppliers, is an
important requirement for operating rapid-reaction responses where established
negotiated arrangements, through social dialogue, do not exist.
External cooperation seems to be essential to effective provision and socially
responsible practice, but it also brings its own challenges. The quality and
relevance of effective information and customer relationship management (CRM)
systems emerge as crucial in harmonising the support to displaced workers at
different stages and avoiding possible confusion, duplication and even
contradictory advice, being given by agencies working with the same individuals.

7.3. The role of career guidance in socially
responsible practice

Against this background, understanding the role of career guidance, and its
effectiveness, in supporting socially responsible restructuring of enterprises
presents substantial challenges. This is partly because the idea is relatively novel
and there is no observed consensus on what socially responsible practice
constitutes. The need to develop both public policy and practice in respect to
career guidance has increasingly been recognised as a labour market and social
policy measure. There seem to be encouraging developments aimed at a more
socially responsible approach to restructuring, beyond compliance with minimum
statutory requirements, now gaining currency in policy terms in Europe. This
remains an often embryonic development With common threads emerging for
what might constitute socially responsible practice. Ideally, this would combine an
early and preventative focus on job protection or ‘flexicurity’ to minimise, defer or
avoid altogether permanent job losses; where lay-offs are involved, both internal
and external adjustments should support those at risk.
Job protection goes beyond remedial financial support and requires
imaginative, open and advance ‘early warning’ systems already being put in
place, combined with periods of advance notification which are likely to be rather
longer than those common in Member States. A focus on job protection within

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