redundancy/performance review post maternity leave

[SarahBumBarer]

Sorry this is long - not too sure how much background to give.

I am just about to return to work (large professional services firm) following 8 months maternity leave. I posted on here at the start of my maternity leave as I had a feeling I might be made redundant whilst on leave.

This has not happened but I understand that my Deprtment has started setting unrealistic performance targets and enforcing these. I am aware of a number of good colleagues now being on performance review as part of this exercise and am worried that my Dept are attempting to manage people out of the business/dismiss them rather than make redundancy pay outs. I am partcularly concerned because I work for a small group within my deprtment which provides services exclusively to a second department in which there has been a large redundnacy programme in the last couple of months so my small group is particularly affected by the reduced workloads.

My questions is how can I deal with this when I return to work? I genuinely believe that my job is redundant but it appears my department is determined not to accept this.

Is there anything I can do if I feel that targets etc are being set unrealistically etc and/or that too much is being expected immediately after returning form maternity leave?

Is there anything I can do if I am expected (with a very young family) frequently to go and work in another office (London - about 2 hours travel away from home). My contract says that my base office is X but I can be required to work elsewhere - is this a blanket permission or is there any kind of reasonableness requirement imported in there? I don't mind doing it for a week every month or even a day or so a week but I don't want effectively to be transferred there whilst still on a regional salary.

I admit that additionally I am feeling a bit knocked in terms of confidence - a general post maternity leave thing (it takes a while to build up work/contacts again etc) plus all this going on.

I would look for another job but if I leave voluntarily within the next 12 months I have to repay all my discretionary maternity pay so this is not an option.

Thanks for any advice

Are you certain they are so desperate to avoid redundancy or that the redundancy/ies are definitely necessary?

If it can definitely be justified then redundancy would almost certainly be quicker and easier than performance managing people out, and unless people have been there ages, not much more expensive, if at all.

Anyway in terms of what you can do, well the same as anyone else really.

If you feel targets are unrealistic and have good reasons you can give for this ("I've just come back from maternity leave" isn't one of those btw), then make that clear when the targets are set.

If workload is significantly reduced, in what way are the targets unrealistic? Is it sales or something?

How much working in London do you usually do/ does everyone else do? That contract seems pretty broad but an effective transfer would probably fall outside that, so if that is proposed, you can resist. You don't have any right to special treatment because you have a young family, so if you normally work in London a fair bit and/or others are, that's fair enough.

If you want to avoid travel, you could put in a flexible working request for that. Are you going back on the same hours you were on previously? It's just you can only put in one request every 12 months, so if you've already requested part time hours or similar, you'll have to wait to put in something else.

Thanks Flowery. I'm pretty sure. It's political plus lots of people have been there a long time on decent salaries and we have a published and reasonably generous redundancy package and it seems to be more senior staff that are being targetted.

There are three main performance targets - billable hours, percentage recovery and sales. I have concerns over all three - sales and percentage recovery are an issue because I am essentially a sub-contractor for another department so have little control over these but I can manage that relatively easily (or have been able to in the past). My concern mainly is billable hours because this one seems to be the basis of the performance reviews currently underway since targets are always "stretch" and seem currently to be ridiculous. Also it just seems unfair to discipline people because they are not doing enough work - none of the people in question are slackers! We have just made a load of people redundant because there is not the work to do yet the week after that redundancy round was announced we all had our chargeable hours targets increased. Based on budgeted income/workflow pipeline there is simply not going to be that level of hours work available.

With regard to London working I do very little but in the past when there has been a reduction in work levels we have all been encouraged to go and work in our London office because the partners/directors there have a tendancy only to block our resourcing department when they try to distribute work to the regions. I've never liked doing so, apart from the travel, our London office tends to operate at least one grade lower than we do in the regions so the work is boring plus naturally the partners/directors there will give the work (certainly the good work) to the people they know first so the effectiveness is questionable. There is a slight tension at the moment between the likelihood of this being repeated and the current non-essential travel ban (so in theory you could go to work in London once you have been assigned a project but not to try and get onto one) which might work in my favour.

I have not made any flexible working requests - I was quite happy to remain full time and work 80 hour weeks when needed (in the past I've always been able to take an hour out for bath and bedtime and then work from home into the small hours if needed and this is fine - I just don't want to spend hours on a train/in a hotel because our London HQ has an outdated presenteeism culture). Do you mean that a flexible working request can be made that relates strictly to travel?