Acas advisers Maggie Steven and Faye Law talk through the key things to keep in mind when managing redundancies. We look at communicating well and why it matters, maintaining trust, how to support the wellbeing of all involved and ensuring it’s a fair process. Episode links: www.acas.org.uk/redundancy The Acas Helpline: 0300 123 1100  Transcript Sarah Guthrie 0:00   Welcome to The Acas Podcast. My name is Sarah Guthrie. I'm part of the communications team here at Acas and today I'm joined by Faye law and Maggie Steven, who are workplace advisors with Acas. We're focusing on redundancy today, which is a huge topic at the moment. And I wondered, Maggie, if you could kick us off with giving us a bit of context: what are the main challenges that employers and staff are finding at the moment around redundancies? Maggie Steven 0:27   I think the one of the biggest challenges - and this is whether it's a large organisation or small organisation - is the fact that could happen very quickly. And so for many very viable businesses with healthy cash flows very quickly, very suddenly, their business model changed. But because of that, it meant for a lot of organisations they weren't able to plan as you would normally do, and therefore we're now kind of almost five, six months down the line and organisations still don't really know where we're going in terms of the economy. They're starting to open up, there's some really good green shoots. But for many, it's still unsure. And therefore when we could talk about redundancies, you know, what is the right way to go? Often organisations are hoping they're going to build their business. But in the short term, they may have some cashflow implications. So they want to retain skills rather than redundancies, but they may find that they're in a position that they may have to make some in the short term for the long term. So there's some real kind of many variants that are feeding in and it's still quite a lot of unsurity about what's what's right for them at the moment, very difficult decisions. Sarah 1:37   What do you think the alternatives to redundancy are? You mentioned that organisations need to retain skills, how can they do that?  Faye Law 1:45   The first thing you can do is ask your staff.You're in a really difficult position and it's so...the most important thing to do is to communicate clearly and openly and be as honest with your staff as you can. You've got to consult them. And the obvious benefit of that is that often those who are doing the jobs are the ones who best know where improvements are. But if you engage with your staff and you work collaboratively with them, that's better for morale, you, they might come up with great ideas to help reduce redundancies. You're going through a difficult exercise and the aim of that is to preserve a viable organisation at the end of it. So I like to think as you're going through this, you should be planning for the organisation after the end of the exercise and keep a focus on that. And you want the people that you keep, as well as the people that you have, sadly, have to lose, to not be scarred by the process. You want them to be engaged employees who still trust you. And the only way you can achieve that is by having them understand the position you're in and hearing their concerns and responding to their concerns and using that to make better informed decisions that they can buy into. Sarah 3:03   That sounds like quite a challenge at the moment. Could you give us an example, perhaps of where you've seen it done well? Faye 3:10   Yes, I worked with an organisation recently that was unfortunately facing the loss of quita a proportion of its workforce. And they did the exercise well in that they jointly trained staff representatives and the management representatives, both around the law on redundancy in consultation,