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The safest way to make under 20 redundancies
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HR management outsourcing is when a team of experts manage your HR by looking after your contracts, policies, and procedures.
These are the HR essentials every business needs. Without them, your staff could bring successful claims against you, you could lose thousands in legal fines, and even face prosecution. Never underestimate the benefits of HR support for a small business.
We have years of experience in providing HR for SMEs and HR management outsourcing. Contact us to see how we can support you, including HR advice for small businesses - as well as medium and large companies.
Good human resource management is having round the clock support when you need it the most.
Whenever there’s a staff challenge or an important legal update, you just pick up the phone and get the help you need – no matter the time or place.
The main benefits of HR outsourcing are:
- Cost saving: Reduces the expenses for such things are hiring, training and employing an in-house HR team.
- Time saving: Saves time for staff members away from HR tasks.
- Improves expertise and compliance: Provides ongoing advice and support to ensure complete and total compliance.
- Reduces risk: Reduces the risk of any payroll and compliance failures.
Outsourcing HR is cheaper than hiring internal staff and saves you money overall when it comes to your HR service. Plus, you avoid making mistakes that could cost you heavily in claims and legal fines down the line. Every business should consider HR support as a way to avoid claims.
Peninsula is one of the leading HR outsourcing services in the UK, and by working with us you get access to our HR advisory service. Contact us for your outsourced SME HR today.
The key functions of HR outsourcing services are:
- Payroll and benefits: Helps a business to manage employee wages, tax processing, and employee enrolment.
- Recruitment and onboarding: Helps with job descriptions, sourcing new candidates, interviewing, and ensuring a smooth onboarding process.
- Compliance with employment law: Helps to ensure compliance with ever-changing employment legislation.
- Employee relations: Helps to manage grievance and disciplinary procedures, and any ongoing support that's required.
- HR admin: Helps to handle and manage daily tasks, such as employee records, sorting employment contracts, and processing any leave requests.
- Training and development: Helps to create and deliver staff training programs to improve employees' skills.
Our HR expert explains the implications of the extended ‘protected period’ for pregnant employees and returnees from family-related leave when considering redundancy:
Poundland owner Pepco has agreed to take on up to 71 Wilko stores, with staff working at the sites given priority for jobs once the sale has been completed.
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Big companies based in the UK are shedding staff. Sainsbury’s announced it will cut 2,000 jobs. BAE Systems will do the same. Meanwhile, Vauxhall is losing 400.
When a larger organisation sharpens the axe ahead of making redundancies, it likely has the HR and legal resources to follow a fair and proper process, avoiding employment tribunals.
Smaller companies rarely have those resources. So making small-scale redundancies (under 20 staff) is fraught with the financial danger.
If redundancy is affecting you (or you want to plan for the worst), we have redundancy advice to help.
Here’s what you need to know.
Make sure it’s a redundancy situation
Redundancies happen in three main situations:
A whole business closes.
A specific location of work
The need to carry out work of a particular kind ends or reduces.
Redundancy is about the role, not the person, so identify the roles affected by the redundancy (whether it’s just one role or several performing the same work).
Look at job descriptions, what staff actually do in their roles, the interchangeability of roles and geographical factors. Before making any position redundant, you should always consider other ways to solve the problem such as freezing recruitment, cutting overtime or putting staff on lay off (unpaid leave until there’s work again).
Have meaningful consultations
For under 20 staff redundancies, there is no minimum or maximum consultation period. Instead, the consultation has to be meaningful.
You must go into consultations with no pre-determination about redundancy. Listen to proposals that affected staff or their representatives submit and give them proper consideration.
The consultation should:
Explain the need for the redundancies
Consider any alternatives to dismissal
Suggest alternative employment
Listen to proposals from affected employees
Agree on selection criteria (how you choose the roles to make redundant)
Ask for volunteers and outline any voluntary redundancy schemes
Usually, two to three meetings are enough, but the process can lengthen depending on the number of proposals or alternatives put forward to you.
Start the selection process
Apply the agreed selection criteria to the roles at risk via a scoring system. Be as objective as possible; personal opinion should not influence you. Be wary of discrimination; for example, ‘first in, last out’ may be discriminatory on the grounds of age.
It’s best practice to have more than one person applying the selection criteria to ensure there’s no bias or unfair application.
Once you have the final scores, you will identify the lowest-scoring employees and should select them for redundancy as they are less beneficial for your business’s future.
Give notice of the redundancies
The employees you select for redundancy should get proper notice of their dismissal, whether contractual or statutory, to avoid them making a tribunal claim.
But even during this notice period, you must still offer affected staff suitable alternative roles should you find any.
Finally, staff with two years’ service at your business are entitled to a statutory redundancy payment up to a maximum of £14,670. You must also pay any contractual or enhanced redundancy pay.
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