The other day I met a Director of a small business (25 staff) which provides research to the finance industry: he had just made 2 people redundant. ‘..But you know, Patricia,’ he said, ‘ they were both under performers anyway!’ Well if they were, they should have been fired, or performance managed out of the business. Doing what Joe did, just makes Redundancy dishonest and highlights how, in the good times, management yet again is the poor performer – not the staff, but in the bad times – it’s the staff who are made redundant.
For the past few years focus has been on attracting, retaining and developing truly talented people, bringing in supposedly, better performance management processes, KPIs, competency frameworks and the like. We have built up staff skills to reflect the business’s needs, empowered them to act and be our envoys. Yet here we are, talking about making these very same staff redundant without a proper eye to the future.