How do organisations choose who to lay off?

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My workplace have told the board that that job losses will be needed and this should be done before the next recruitment round.
I'm not sure I even know when the next recruitment round will be ??!

I was wondering how they choose who to make redundant. I work for a college and staff haven't been informed of this yet No teaching jobs will be lost.

With my employer, it's done the other way round. Those with the longer or longest service get to keep their jobs, which puts the relative newbies at risk of lay-off or total severance. Harsh but probably fair.

Every organisation will. Be different, obviously within employment law but there's no one way to go about it. I'd say most situations are unique in their specifics

How does that work, is there only one job role or do you mean length of service is the criteria within each role.

That would work if you have multiple employees doing exactly the same thing but that's not the norm is it?

I've run a lot of redundancy programmes, it's all slightly different but in the main...

Behind the scenes they will decide what the new structure should look like - so if they have to reduce costs by 20% for example their best idea of how they can do that and still continue working.

This will usually mean reducing or removing any activities/roles that are 'nice to have' rather than absolutely critical for that organisation. It may be reducing team sizes and/or asking managers to manage bigger teams.

Then, when this has all been done they announce the changes that are proposed.

Depending on how many people are being made redundant they may or may not need to have a period of consultation with staff at risk. Under 12 people impacted = no consultation. After that it's a 30 day period unless more than 100 people impacted as then 45 days.

If all of a certain role are being removed (let's say every single person doing the ABC Role) then at the end of the consultation period those roles are made redundant. You will be told of any suitable alternative roles in the organisation that you can apply for but otherwise (or if not successful in applying for them) you will be given notice.

If it's not the case that ALL of a certain role are being removed but they just reduce the number of those roles (so a team of 10 ABC Roles now needs to be a team of 5) then they can do one of the following.

Paper process; They come up with a scoring matrix and assess all ten people against it. Those 5 with the best scores keep their jobs. They can decide on what is used for scoring but it has to be objective so is usually some combination of previous performance scores, previous sickness/absence records and any disciplinary issues.

If there is a tie they will usually then go to interviews between the people tied.

OR

Interviews; They decide not to do a paper process and all 10 people are interviewed for their roles. 5 are successful, the other 5 are redundant.

Occasionally they may ask for 'volunteers' before the paper/interview process. This doesn't happen so often these days but I believe still happens at universities sometimes.

Sorry, yes as PP says they can also decide to do it based on length of service.

The places I've worked have steered away from that as it can be indirectly discriminatory against younger people but a lot of places do it.

It works well for the employer to have a 'last in, first out' policy because the longer someone's been there the more expensive they are to make redundant. It means they lose the opportunity to use the redundancies to remove the lower performers though so depends what's more important to them - saving money right now or having a better performing organisation.

Also worth knowing that if they use absences as part of the scoring criteria it excludes pregnancy related illnesses and should exclude anything related to a disability under the Equality Act (which includes some mental health conditions).

My ex employer has decided to issue everyone with a pay cut. Unsurprisingly a lot of people have or are leaving - and for more money elsewhere. I suspect that itl be chalked up as natural wastage.

Thanks wheresmymojo that was very useful. I don't think they will do an interview / paper process thing as there are loads of jobs across the college. It's a massive college with adult learning and kids and community stuff with several sites. So I think it'll just be a case of being given notice.

I have a really bad feeling my job will go as it's as you say a "nice to have" role. There are days I hardly have anything to do! It's mad! I only work pt and it's one of the lowest bands so they won't be saving much money with me!

I agree, Terrapin, but that's what we've been told. I've no doubt there's more to it that the staff are not privy to.

Are you in a union OP?

I’m in a large college and they have a points system for redundancies. We were told in the latest round that no teaching jobs were going to go, when in actual fact it’s only teaching jobs which are going.

PaperMonster from the meeting notes it was made clear that teaching jobs won't go unless it meant that they no longer offered that subject etc. So looks like everyone else will be at risk. Ive only been there 9m.