Key Considerations When Planning Redundancies – An HR Perspective

In the article entitled "Planning for redundancies – A legal perspective" Dr Maria Tabone, Senior Business and Corporate Advisor looked at the minimum obligations on the part of the employer and the legal parameters within which redundancies can take place. Whilst the law is unequivocal on some considerations that employers need to action, it provides little guidance for those leading people and teams on how to best communicate redundancies with the least damage to employee engagement, productivity and employer brand.

Several articles appearing in the last ten years on online platforms such as the Financial Times and Harvard Business Review, discuss the high costs of making employees redundant. The most significant of these costs is not related to those actually made redundant but attributed to the repercussions and challenges the company faces after the redundancies – particularly the productivity and engagement of 'surviving' employees. This is not surprising. Once