Page 91 - Socially-responsible-restructuring-Effective-strategies-for-supporting-redundant-workers

Socially responsible restructuring
Effective strategies for supporting redundant workers

to consider their options. The employer can also exercise choice, for example
choosing a careers advice provider from an approved list.
Where support for training and retraining is available, this has led to displaced
employees taking the opportunity to reorient themselves by choosing a different
career trajectory, sometimes dictated by a personal desire for change, or by a
realistic perception of where future jobs might be. To construct a realistic
perspective on future labour market prospects demands adequate information.
However, this is not always the case, partly because of the inherent difficulties in
labour market forecasting. Since this sort of information is crucial to making
informed career choices, in Karmann, Germany, the transfer company carryies
out its own regional labour market analysis to support the advice given. This is
unusual and is partly due to the resources available in this case, though the
company concerned is not particularly large. However, there are more cases
where employers use their extensive contacts to assess where job vacancies are
and use this information, alongside other, to illustrate where labour demand is.
This contact with other employers is taken to another stage in cases where
employers bring on site representatives of other companies to interview and
recruit their displaced workers. In the case of Anglesey Aluminium, in the UK,
national and international employers have come on site to inform and interview
displaced workers with considerable success in finding suitable new employees.
In the case of Siemens, the range of employer contacts maintained by the
transfer company extends to 5 500 enterprises nationally and internationally, with
the information available through the dedicated on-site jobcentre.
The individual support given can vary and is often related to the size of the
company and the resources at its disposal. There are two examples where the
scale of the support is particularly innovative and which have a broadly similar
approach based on giving the displaced employees more time to consider their
options. Teliasonera has introduced its distinctive ‘competence pool’ to which
those staff facing redundancy are transferred so that they can receive specialist
support to help them find an alternative job or other suitable outcome while still
receiving their normal salary. The pressure of working out a period of notice is
taken away and the employee can concentrate on the transition outside the
company. One of the indirect impacts of this approach is that it helps create a
harmonious atmosphere in the company generally and, in particular, among the
remaining workforce. In Sweden, Volvo has instituted large-scale redundancies
following restructuring and, while the individual support activities involved have
not been particularly innovative, the scale of the operation and its duration has.
For example, staff being made redundant are given long periods of notice of
between four and six months, corresponding with the comparatively generous

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