Page 174 - Socially-responsible-restructuring-Effective-strategies-for-supporting-redundant-workers

Socially responsible restructuring
Effective strategies for supporting redundant workers

restructuring may go against securing optimum early cost-savings but will appeal
to enterprises keen to retain their skills base, and their commitment and
motivation, to take speedy advantage of better times, and to reduce medium-term
costs such as severance and compensation packages. The review suggests that
job protection will be aided by any existing arrangements established for
flexicurity at the workplace, including training and guidance to enhance
transferability in the workforce. Enhancing job security will require anticipated
changes in work organisation.
Beyond prevention, social responsibility in restructuring will cover what we
have referred to as ‘guidance plus’ methods of support for those being made
redundant and at risk of unemployment. This is likely to involve vocational
training for those in redundant posts or activities to optimise their chances of
securing other work in the company, or externally, where the training is most
likely to be geared to realistic opportunities for re-employment and including
enterprise start-up. Training effectiveness calls on integrated guidance support,
including competence assessment and counselling. Where early retirement is
chosen, a range of other guidance-related support is needed, geared to life
changes as much as employment transitions.
In these circumstances, more outward looking external adjustments may then
become more of an offer of last, rather than first, resort to support ‘surplus’
labour. However, this is set to place a premium on enterprise management, and
social partnership, structures which can work towards anticipating the
consequences of restructuring. Even where this takes place there may still be a
call on external adjustments, emphasising support for re-engagement with the
labour market and education and training, variously involving outplacement and
assisted by brokerage, often in combination with external agencies or suppliers.
The case study evidence suggests socially responsible practice would be
about broadening the range of guidance-related support and modes of delivery,
personalising the support, ensuring it taps robust employment understanding and
relationships, and providing for appropriate periods of support, with some
continuity after redundancy and after care. It is also often about effective and
responsive partnership.
One way of looking at socially responsible restructuring is to classify different
adjustment responses and to set out a typology of practice, as Figure 1
cautiously attempts to do. It suggests that enterprises responding to
restructuring, within different national contexts of legislative requirements and
safety nets, will do so in one of four generalised patterns of response:
compliance, compliance plus, cooperative and transitional.

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