Want to avoid unconscious bias in redundancy? Treat it like a recruitment campaign!
Downsizing a workforce is pretty much like recruiting. You want the best people in your (smaller) workforce – but you have more ‘applicants’ than roles, AND you must ensure that you’re not discriminating against, or in favour of, particular candidates. So why not treat redundancy like a recruitment campaign?
Covid 19 has dealt a significant blow to many organisations’ plans for their immediate future. Instead of expanding, they’re reducing their workforce to match decreased revenue streams.
And while ‘sticklers’ are keen to point out that you make roles redundant, not people, the true impact is on loyal, living, breathing, rent-paying, family-providing-for people, NOT the roles they occupy.
How organisations handle this reduction process is important for departing employees – but crucial for those remaining. Employees who stay can be prone to ‘survivor’ syndrome (why did they go, and I stayed?) while also worrying they might be next.
You can’t eliminate every issue but treat leavers fairly, make the process visible to your existing employees and the anxiety will diminish, leaving a more engaged and motivated workforce, driving your business forward.
There are many scenarios you might face. You may need to:
- Lose a percentage of roles, while identical roles remain.
- Lose parts of different roles with remaining roles becoming hybrids of what’s left.
- Simply lose headcount to steady the ship, reallocating any work that isn’t covered.
None of us is immune to bias so we need to recognise, and eliminate, the potential for it. The temptation to retain people you like or people you think do a good job is huge – but you may have to justify subjective decisions.
And, of course, the roles you need in your new ‘slimline’ organisation, may not be the roles you have now, so identifying the best people for the ‘new’ hybrid roles could be key to your survival, not just your success. When survival is at stake, near enough is not good enough.
What’s the best process for an unbiased approach to redundancy? Your response will be different, depending on whether you have:
- An agreement on the process in your redundancy policy (last in, first out, for example).
- Measurable roles (sales, for example) where performance can be a key decision-making factor.
- Roles that are not directly measurable (often the huge majority of roles).
If the roles you are considering are in categories 1 or 2, you have a reasonably clear path forward. But if they are, in part or entirely, in category 3, you need to look for a way that does not leave you open to challenge.
In that eventuality, you should:
- Identify the key requirements of the role(s).
- Design a psychometric assessment that precisely matches those requirements. Remember, assessments (or at least benchmarks) should be different for different roles (one size really doesn’t fit all, whatever your current assessment provider may suggest). Using Great People Inside’s extensive menu of over 60 different Behaviours, Cognitive Traits and Occupational Interests, you can design the exact assessment(s) you need for every role.
- Identify your most successful employees in each role (or in the case of hybrid roles, the deliverables you need from the new, amalgamated roles).
- Use this data to create a ‘success profile’ against which every relevant member of staff will be measured.
- Use the objective data, provided by Great People Inside’s comprehensive reports, as a key component of your redundancy decisions.
Great People Inside does not know your people and our assessments are not biased in favour of, or against, any employee or group of employees. Every individual will get an equal opportunity to take the assessment and their responses measured against the ‘success profile’.
If you want to eliminate bias from your redundancy decisions, work with Great People Inside to ‘recruit’ the workforce you need for an uncertain future. In a world of subjective decisions, we will provide you with the objective data you need to make well-informed, secure people decisions.
