Ringwood based human resources consultancy View HR, has witnessed a growing demand from businesses in Southern England for their expertise in highly sensitive process of making staff redundancies.
Gemma Murphy, who launched View HR 4 years ago, believes that businesses are now more aware of the costs, both in terms of financial and reputation, of mishandling the legal process, where its individual or mass redundancies.
“We are first to admit that its one of the most stressful roles that we can be asked to oversee on behalf of our clients as these are people who have families, bills, mortgages and when faced with redundancy, this can make for a very bleak outlook. Whether its 1, 3, or 100 people facing redundancy, it motivates us is to do it properly, fairly and to give employees the dignity they deserve for their service to the business,” said Gemma Murphy.
View HR recently undertook a large scale collective redundancy consultation process (over 60 employees impacted) in London for in the professional services sector, Gemma admits that the feedback that resulted from those impacted by the restructure, was more gratifying than the fee.
“We knew that we had consulted with staff correctly when we received a few hugs and thanks for treating them all fairly and with dignity. I also received an email saying “I just wanted to take the time to thank you for your professionalism and fairness during such a difficult period”, that’s nice and that helps me sleep at night Ultimately, if a business needs to or make redundancies, it is going to happen, but that doesn’t stop it being done fairly and professionally.”
Organisations should be aware of the financial consequences when management fails to follow the correct legal procedures, especially when there is more than 20 employees at risk of redundancy. Businesses regularly come unstuck where they don’t follow a consultation process. Businesses no matter what the size, or turnover, cannot just make people redundant. There is a fear that in weak industry sectors, businesses will be making redundancies to survive, but where they have not followed a process, they could face major dismissal claims which in turn cripples the business they were trying to save. For further information and www.viewhr.co.uk