COVID-19 | You've been made redundant - what are your options?

In March 2020, the devastating ramifications of the coronavirus pandemic drastically changed the business landscape overnight.

For HR, new and unprecedented challenges stood between carefully curated HR strategies and daily life for all working people within the UK. Suddenly, the tables switched from steadily improving the quality of life for employees to working out how and if jobs could even continue – with the Government’s furlough scheme inevitably soaking up a total of one-quarter of England’s workforce.

To put it plainly, it’s been a frightening time. Impacts to mental health are yet to be fully realised, yet early predictions display a bleak trend, whilst the current number of paid employees across the nation took a nosedive of 649,000 over the three months from March, according to HMRC and ONS data. The same studies found that the number of people claiming unemployment benefits dipped 28,100 from May to highs of just over 2.6million in June. The total number of claimants has risen 112.2% since March.

And whilst HR has proven itself to be one of the most vital and influential functions in this turbulent time, with hundreds of thousands of redundancies taking place – and more to come as businesses falter to find a balance in the much-touted ‘new normal’ –  it’s a sad inevitability that some of these redundancies could be in the field itself.