Page 33 - Socially-responsible-restructuring-Effective-strategies-for-supporting-redundant-workers

Socially responsible restructuring
Effective strategies for supporting redundant workers

million jobs (European Commission, 2009a). Many of these job losses have also
affected sectors where such employment effects in past economic downturns
have been limited, including the financial and businesses service sectors.
Although the economic downturn remains a critical backcloth to this review,
the empirical basis for this study is not limited to recessionary impacts through
job losses. Instead its focus is on enterprise restructuring more generally, a more
enduring challenge for a dynamic European economy, and where the term
‘restructuring’ has been defined by the European Commission (2008c) as:

‘A modification of a company’s workforce that affects both the latter’s qualitative (skills and
qualifications required) and its quantitative features (number of jobs) following adaptations
to the company’s structure, organisation or production)’ (p. 1).

In these terms, the private sector in Europe is being affected by widespread
restructuring effects of a globalising market, shortening product cycles,
competitive pressures and other structural changes. To this is added an
accelerating process of acquisition and consolidation in capital markets, driving
new corporate models, structural changes and intensifying downward pressures
on business costs. Corporate restructuring is undertaken in response to a range
of frequently interrelated factors such as changes in management and market,
demand, the introduction of new processes or the arrival of new competitors, and
is seen as necessary for companies to remain competitive. In public and related
services, the causes may have been different but restructuring has been driven
by sometimes equally relentless pressures on cost-efficiencies, deregulation and
in adjustment to novel forms of service organisation and delivery. In both the
private and public sectors such pressures include continuing technological
change and adjustment, and go far beyond irregular cyclical changes in the world
economy.
These pressures on businesses are not new and have intensified since the oil
shock crisis of the mid-1970s. Organisational research in the UK (CIPD, 2009)
now suggests that multi-national and other large companies in the early years of
the new century were undergoing major change about once every three years,
5
while more localised changes were even more frequent ( ). Successive studies of
employment trends have also drawn attention to the effects of such volatility in
organisational scope and structures on employment opportunities and needs.

5
( ) It is clear from research, that there is substantial variation in the success of reorganisations.
For example, in the UK, CIPD (CIPD, 2003) found that nearly half failed to achieve desired
improvements. Key issues identified included that only just over a quarter (27%) of
organisations offered training to those managing reorganisations and: ‘a third of respondents
indicate that the performance of employee-related factors, such as retention and motivation,
improved as a result of the reorganisation’ (p. 12).

27