Restructuring or downsizing your business

Restructuring is about making sure you have the right roles to deliver to your customers and your strategy — it’s not a way to manage individual employee performance issues.

Legally you need a genuine business reason to restructure your business. You’ll need to state this clearly as you go through the process.

Genuine reasons include:
•    realignment of brand
•    changing your product or service offerings
•    financial issues resulting in the need to downsize or realign
•    no longer using a department
•    wanting to outsource certain business functions
•    merging with another business.

See more information on the guidelines for workplace change here.
 

A few tips that are worth following:

Communicate clearly
Have a written proposal. Iit needs to talk about roles, not people. It should state the reason for the restructure, and the expected benefit. Be sure to also communicate what is staying the same, as people need an anchor in stormy seas.

Engage with resistance
Invite those who will be impacted to a meeting to discuss the proposal. Don’t seek to overcome resistance, this is normal and often highly complex.  Listen to the feedback. Let your employees submit feedback in written form or in meetings with you. It’s important that you do not consider the proposal as a done deal before you’ve heard and considered feedback.

Build change capability within
This may be your first restructure  but is unlikely to be your last. What do you need to do to build internal capabilities for change? To facilitate the change transition, you need to allow all of your employees to have a corresponding understanding of what they are trying to achieve and be open to that change.

Ensure a united front.
Now is the time that as a leadership team you need to unite and ensure a parallel process when releasing aligned information and key messages. You do not want your employees hearing things first on the radio/newspaper/ twitter/ Facebook.

Beware of Survivor Syndrome.
Be sure to engage and listen to the employees who stay. Ensuring that you are not left with higher stress, increased sick leave, increased intent to leave and reduced performance.

Seek legal advice
There are specific rules on redeployment — when you create a new role that isn’t substantively different from an old role. In that case, you must redeploy a person in the current role to the new one. This is a technical area, and legal advice might be valuable.

There are also specific rules on downsizing, when you’re reducing the number of a certain type of existing role. For example, if you currently have three junior hairdressers, but you think you only need one, you’ll need to set out specific details in the proposal, including the selection criteria for how you’ll choose the successful individual. If you are not familiar with these rules and process, you should get help from an expert. This is a technical area, and legal advice might be valuable.

>> Read more about my change management services.