Page 70 - Socially-responsible-restructuring-Effective-strategies-for-supporting-redundant-workers

Socially responsible restructuring
Effective strategies for supporting redundant workers

4. Enterprise capacity and collaborations

Company restructuring is frequently a consequence of organisational change in
response to changing business needs, corporate take-overs, and wider economic
circumstances. Alongside services delivered by social partners inside the
company, the task of supporting individuals in transition through restructuring is
often undertaken in a wider range of partnerships. In this chapter we consider:
(a) enterprise capacity and career guidance in the context of more general HRD
issues, including support for career development;
(b) partnerships and external capacity, in particular, models of partnership
arrangements through the case study research, especially within existing
national, regional and European programmes;
(c) restructuring cooperation between companies and PES and some of the
views expressed about its effectiveness.
As with the previous chapter, the source evidence is drawn largely from the
individual and partnership-led restructuring case studies within this review.

4.1. Enterprise capacity and career guidance

The literature suggests that there is some ambivalence about company
involvement in career guidance and in wider career development and reconciling
the three interrelated issues of business development, workforce development,
and in individual career development.
With sufficient planning and forethought, it is possible to develop appropriate,
socially responsible, responses. For example, the ETUC have identified what
they assess as good practice in terms both of responsible restructuring and skills
and career development in the three–year agreement signed by Air France and
five trade unions, in 2006 on anticipating changes in ground staff (see box).
However, such foresight is not always present in companies, nor in the
willingness to engage with individual employees, or their representatives in trade
unions.
In the present case study research, a number of comprehensive examples of
corporate programmes were identified: examples are TeliaSonera Finland and
Siemens BeE (Case studies 10 and 8). Teliasonera introduced a ‘competence
pool’ in autumn 2005, which enabled employees to maintain their contract with
the company while they were given time to seek new career opportunities. The

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