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Socially responsible restructuring
Effective strategies for supporting redundant workers

This typology is presented here tentatively and as a basis for further review,
but suggests that neither ‘compliance’ or ‘compliance plus’ adjustments can be
said to conform to socially responsible practice in restructuring.

Innovations and effectiveness

An important focus of this comparative research is to understand the conditions
for wider transferability of better practice. Here, there is very limited evidence of
the impact of different practices beyond the short term. The review has,
nonetheless, drawn out some cross-cutting issues for effective practice in
achieving more immediate results.
Career guidance services within restructuring enterprises cannot be
developed or applied in isolation from related services to support displaced
workers and, in particular, direct brokerage, work trials, enterprise start-up
support and underpinning training and retraining activities that respond to
individual circumstances.
Career guidance support is more effective in restructuring situations where it is
customised, and this calls for strategies where services are genuinely tailored to
needs. These stem from adaptive arrangements for initial and continuing
assessment of the displaced workers; while this may harness some group
support, it emphasises individualised guidance.
Guidance-related support in restructuring may need to be improved for more
vulnerable groups to reflect greater difficulties in labour market reintegration. This
may go beyond low or ‘redundant’ skill groups to include longer serving
employees with little or no recent experience of the external labour market.
Without this, the extra support provided will not be sufficient to overcome greater
disadvantage in the labour market.
Career guidance support in restructuring works best where it is based on
robust local and occupational labour market information and networks.
Practitioners supplying guidance, outplacement and associated brokerage to
other employment or training needs are crucial intermediaries in supporting
realistic judgments and decision-making. In fast-changing labour markets, the
currency of labour market knowledge requires a wide range of local and sectoral
employer relationships.
Effective organisational adjustments need robust, and often extensive,
collaboration with diverse guidance and other service suppliers, and effective
procurement of such services. The quality of integration, and partnership
working, with those suppliers is crucial to optimising the opportunities for

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