Five Typical Mistakes in Handling Redundancy
Handling redundancy is one of the most complex challenges that employers may face. In addition to being unpleasant, terminating employment relation may trigger serious legal and financial risks and challenges for the employer, especially when it involves significant workforce reduction. Typical examples of aforesaid are public enterprises, which in the last decade have become “easy targets” for mass lawsuits in the field of labor law. The immediate causes of such issues are procedural mistakes, while the root cause often lies in insufficient knowledge of court practice (much less in ignorance of the law itself).
Typical mistakes in handling redundancy include:
- Terminating employment contracts concluded for indefinite period, despite the existence of employees on fixed-term contracts employed due to increased workloads in the same positions;
- Failing to evaluate all employees in positions where the number of employees is being reduced, or conducting evaluations based on unauthorized criteria;
- Not applying employment measures (most commonly, measures such as redeployment to other positions, even if these require a lower level of qualification);
- Misuse of the right to implement organizational changes, i.e., eliminating undisciplined, lazy, or unskilled workers based on grounds that are incompatible with the cause of (often justified) dissatisfaction of the employer (instead of using an appropriate reason for termination);
- Filling vacant work positions that precede, or as courts illustratively describe, “gravitate” to the moment of employment termination due to redundancy, which the employer could have used to offer redeployment to those positions instead of terminating employment relation.
Choosing professional and experienced legal advisors will help you avoid costly mistakes when facing this uncomfortable issue—mistakes that can deal significant financial blows to your company’s operations.