Humbled….
I received a message from a blog-reader (if that is the technical term!) on Linkedin about my blog about it is the job not the person. The writer has recently been made redundant and it helped to remind him that it wasn’t about him or his performance but the fact that the job couldn’t be supported any longer.
At the time of writing the blog, I wasn’t thinking about the employees, just business reasons and lack of knowledge/good sense on the behalf of management (HR can be included quite happily in this catagory). It allowed me to remember the time I was put at risk - I cried. I knew intellectually it wasn’t about me - it was a case of wrong time, wrong place in the organisation but I still was very emotional about it - which rather took back my Director as he thought I was “stronger than that”.
It is too easy to forget or neglect the human impact in redundancy, sometimes as a protection mechanism for ourselves against the obvious emotional impact of telling someone they are to be sacked through no fault of their own (well, those who don’t end up at the bottom of the selection pile for poor performance etc).
I suppose let’s remember the “human” in Human Resources.
March 10th, 2009 at 8:26 am
Redundancy is about the job, but we make real people redundant. HR needs to be more proactive about holding onto talent (people) when a role (job) need goes. We write about the ‘war for talent’ and ‘talent management’,rarely do I hear of organisations going to much effort to retain talent in a redundancy situation. Legal constraints are an issue but a well structures process which seeks to retain the best people and ‘bump’ the redundacies should be used more often.
March 10th, 2009 at 8:46 am
One HR Director once said to me - (I think whistfully contemplating his retirement) that “when it was called Personnel, you were dealing with people, when it became HR - they changed to resources” and that, maybe, is the cruz of it…
March 16th, 2009 at 1:26 pm
The current recession has focused much attention on job losses and redundancy, however, even before the current crisis some 2000 people were being made redundant every working day. Many intelligent, accomplished, talented and experienced people go through the emotional and financial aftershock that the often abrupt process of involuntary unemployment brings. Carefully honed careers that have taken years of hard work to build can disappear seemingly in a moment. I set up my website www.newlifenetwork.co.uk in 2005 to help those very people to rebuild their lives after redundancy because so many simply didn’t know where to turn to find the help they needed. It doesn’t take long to become invisible in recruitment terms. I would like to see employers pay far more attention to the reabsorption of talent back into the workforce whatever the reason for it’s loss - career breaks, redundancy etc. We talk about recycling and carbon footprints in the context of sustainability but we need better strategies for managing the sustainability of talent throughout the employment cycle too.