Tell me your terrible redundancy stories

[faial]

There's a thread about someone who's just been made redundant and her employer appears to have handled in a really awful way and it got me thinking about redundancies and how badly and insensitively they are done sometimes.

In one place I worked there were 2 rounds of redundancies (neither involving me thankfully) a couple of years apart. In the first round some people were invited to a meeting at a local hotel the company sometimes used for large meetings. Each person was told to turn up at a certain time, to find only the CEO and someone from HR waiting who delivered the bad news. On arriving back at the office they were met by another employee in the car park and escorted to their desk to retrieve belongings and escorted out. Obviously word spread and people were looking out of the windows to see who was leaving the building at weird times. I've heard several similar stories from people who worked at other companies so I think this is quite common.

The second round was worse and this is possibly outing but never mind. They made a load of people redundant by sending letters in the post on a Friday. A few people obviously didn't get theirs in time and turned up for work on Monday, got into the building to find they couldn't log into their computers, called IT support. Only the head of IT support had been told about the redundancies so there were several very puzzled support people trying to work out why multiple accounts had been locked. The head of IT support eventually appeared and explained and escorted them out. Odd that their door passes hadn't been deactivated.

At the time some colleagues and I were working on a client site in London and our manager was back at the main office that day as he had some stuff to do. It was only him ringing us up quite early with the words "still got a job then?" that alerted us to what was happening. We thought that we were probably safe as we were on one of the few projects that was making the company money but nevertheless we both had to phone our respective homes and ask our partners to check the post and eventually our manager was able to confirm that we were not affected.

I'm glad I left that company, they were quite awful in lots of other ways mainly because one of the directors was bonkers.

I remember someone being made redundant just before Christmas and shouting "Happy Christmas" as he left.

I was made redundant from a small company - myself and a colleague were the only two made redundant and the only two employees who were over 50. The directors were all related or best pals.

The boss was obviously spoiling for a fight and summoned me into a meeting where he attempted to criticise my performance, time keeping etc, which I could easily disprove using company timesheets. Two other directors present looked embarrassed but said nothing, the cowards.

Having decided I wanted nothing more to do with this company, given their actions, I didn't fight the redundancy but negotiated my own terms with a payoff, after having gone part-time for 3 months with my only task being to finish the one project I now cared about.

It was a very stressful time generally, my parent were both elderly and ailing, I was suffering investigations for potential cancer and my hair started falling out in clumps. No sympathy from managers. Horrible - glad that's well behind me now.

It’s always a shock when you are told there is even a threat of redundancy. When we were told people would have to go as I was very upset, loved my job and wanted to keep it. But I should have seen it as an opportunity and not as a threat. After the redundancies we were re-organised and I got a terrible micro-manager for a line manager. I wished I’d taken the money!

Friend of mine had started a new job

She'd been there 3 weeks when the boss called her and 3 others into the meeting room

'Your all sacked-call it redundancy if you want-hand your passes in as you leave,you have 5 minutes'

She came straight to my work to see if I was about (I was) and burst into tears

Her girlfriend had dumped her that morning,so she was now
single,homeless and jobless

This was the week before christmas just gone

This was the NHS

Poor thing had passed over another job the month before as this job paid a tiny bit more

Bloody disgusting behaviour