How HR can handle redundancies 'humanely'

By her own admission, it was one particular redundancy – the first time she’d ever had to do one – that Kim Stokes, former HR manager at PepsiCo, still remembers vividly to this day.

“I recall following the process to a ‘T’,” she reflects. “But at the end of it, all the employee I was talking to did was look at me, and with a face that told me I’d utterly betrayed her. It stuck with me. It still does today.”

For Stokes – who since recalls having to let one person go on the eve of them getting married – and who now runs coaching firm Kindness for Success – there are two ways a redundancy can be done. There’s the mechanical, done-to-the-letter, no-legal-comeback-way, or one that embraces compassion, kindness, and actually puts the ‘H’ into human resources.

But in this year, where jobs are being cut at their fastest rate for the last five years, and HR professionals will face doing more redundancies than perhaps they’ve done for a while, is there really room (and appetite) for doing redundancies that could be described as being ‘better’ when there’s a risk that without sticking to a precise process, things could actually be made more complicated for them?

Can redundancy be done ‘better’?

“I can completely see why HR professionals doing redundancies err to them resembling something more like an impersonal tick-box exercise than something with shared personal empathy,” says Tracey Burke, Lead HR Business Partner at outplacement firm, WorkNest.

“A lot of the announcements, consultations and initial meetings that accompany the process of doing job losses are pre-determined by a set legal framework that has to be got right. But at the same time, checklists ‘are’ de-humanising.”

She adds: “I think there is absolutely the room to have compassion at the front of one’s mind – or at the very least convey some sort of understanding that the employer and employee are engaging in something that is a stressful situation.” As Stokes herself adds: “I absolutely feel that HR ‘can’ be humane whilst also following a process. Actually, without being humane, the process becomes so much worse. In a redundancy in particular, the human piece has to actually shine through even more.”

What’s holding HR back?

In addition to HR themselves finding redundancies uncomfortable (making it’s easier to simply stick to a checklist of process to tick off), experts argue that what HR professionals really fear, is that by letting in any scintilla of shared understanding, they could be seen as not treating everyone equally. In other words, it’s better to be bland and impersonal.

“This is something we probably get more people coming to us for advice about than anything else,” argues Bar Huberman, Content Manager, HR Strategy & Practice, at Brightmine. “There’s the legal aspect of what information needs to be conveyed, but after this, there’s the ‘how’ they do it, how not to come across as disingenuous, and there’s concern that if HR people are not on their guard, information gets drip-fed to only certain people, or that they might share information that there isn’t yet certainty about, to appear more compassionate.”

But, says Angela Rixon, founder and CEO of The Centre for Meaningful Work: “There’s a very thin line between acting humanely and using policy as something that companies can hide behind, to make redundancies feel deeply tone deaf.

Rixon has spent 15 years in senior HR roles and adds: “To my mind, the clearer organisations are about communicating the process in the first place, that’s when being more humane can then come in.”

She claims organisations often underestimate the ‘purpose-to-meaning gap’ – but it’s something they cannot ignore. “It’s uncomfortable laying people off,” she accepts. “It misaligns with most HR people’s values. But there’s a place for the organisation to say ‘there’s something we need to face; we need to enter conversations about it, and there might be change that we need to adapt to.’” She adds: “Not saying anything is also a problem, and that creates its own level of uncertainty.”

Where HR professionals have tried to inject some element of sympathy, or certainly some more human-level understanding, Bharat Siyani, VP of People and Culture at Breathe HR, says they’ve come a cropper. “I’ve seen it go both ways,” he says, “where people try to take a more humane approach, and then things just get more complicated. This burns people, and predisposes them to instead take the more regimented route.”

A middle ground?

So what is the solution? “There is always a middle ground,” argues Siyani. “Respect is a two –way street, and if you give it, you’ll get it back. HR needs to say no to being robotic, no to being fluffy, but it’s about trying to build up a systematic offering – such as providing signposting to outplacement services; resources people can go to, to brush up their CVs, about leveraging a relationship without it causing accusations of favouritism.”