Page 40 - Socially-responsible-restructuring-Effective-strategies-for-supporting-redundant-workers

Socially responsible restructuring
Effective strategies for supporting redundant workers

Internal adjustment services tend to include training linked to the temporary
management of surplus labour, either funded by the company, or most often
jointly by the company and the public authorities. Training enables firms to restart
or reorient business, when circumstances permit, with a more highly skilled
workforce. Further, working time changes are a potentially powerful instrument
for coping with temporary and permanent redundancies, which may have been
underused in past restructuring circumstances in favour of more immediate
measures. Finally, leave schemes with right of return to the workplace, variously
funded, are constrained by the relative unpredictability of economic cycles.
With external adjustment, the processes involved in enterprise restructuring
generally start with adjustments in the allocations and roles of white and blue-
collar personnel, to allow surplus labour to be shed, typically among non-
permanent employees including sub-contract labour. Beyond this, in-company
responses to restructuring which involve displacing permanent employees take
numerous forms and involve different levels and types of career guidance
interventions. External adjustments are led and usually also funded by the
company, although they may be a part of a support package which also involves
some external intervention. Within this, downsizing, outplacement and career
development at work are the three main forms of enterprise adjustment to
changes in production and market demands. These are not mutually exclusive
and may be used in different combinations for different types of displaced or at-
risk employees in the same restructuring situations; previous research has not
explored how they affect different groups of vulnerable workers.
Organisational change frequently leads to significant internal redeployment
and the need to downsize, by making a number of job roles redundant and by
reducing the number of employees. Conversely, in situations where there is no
office or plant closure (CIPD, 2003), it can lead to new recruitment or the
redeployment of staff into what is sometimes referred to as the ‘right-sized’
workforce. While still a feature of downsizing in some sectoral contexts, and
notably the public sector, early retirement is now less commonly used in Europe
than a decade ago, usually due to differential costs.
A number of reviews on effective practice in downsizing, in particular in the
USA where it has dominated corporate approaches, have defined key features of
good practice across the public and private sectors (National Performance
Review, 1997). In particular, planning for downsizing requires the development of
differentiated business plans across the organisation – including identifying work
processes that will not be needed in the future – and the use of multiple
strategies and techniques to accomplish goals, which helps to leverage the
outcome by producing more options for workforce reduction. Successful

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