Recently i chatted with one person that was made redundant.  Her description of the process was “I was notified I was being made redundant, and immediately frog-marched out of the building. I wasn’t even given the opportunity to collect my wedding photos off my desk. It was all rather disrespectful.”

The above is an example of a company that is not approaching the letting go of people in the right manner.  How should companies handle this most difficult of times?

Companies (and more importantly their HR managers) need to remember that they are dealing with people and that letting someone go, no only impacts the life of the employee but also the employee’s family. Therefore, how people are fired is often just as important as making the decision to get rid of them in the first place.  This is often forgotten in the rush to move them out of the business and often firing people becomes no more than a process that HR follows.

There are costs associated with firing people.  The obvious is the payout  the employee is entitled to.  However, there are often hidden costs and how you let someone go can impact the size and impact of these costs.

The first is the decreased productivity as people around the business spend time talking about who has gone and how they were treated.  If the process is not clear, these people also spend time looking for other jobs believing they may be next.

The second is the external cost in future recruiting.  People talk and disgruntled ex-employees talk alot.  People get to know how a company treats its employees and they often think twice before signing up to work for that company, thus increasing the future cost of employment.

Therefore, there are some simple things a company can do to make the process easier all round.

• Have an open and honest discussion with the employee and to make sure that they understand what is happening and why it is happening.
• If mulitple employees are being let go, do it all at once – dont spread it out – and communicate clearly.
• Treat them with respect during the process rather than just walk them out the door.  They are not criminals.

A month ago i decided that we needed to let 3 people go from our Arts Hub business. Now i made this decision because in tough times, i needed to rebalance the business and i wanted to move people from non-revenue generating roles to revenue generating role (sales) and the people i had were not sales people. The approach we took was to discuss the change with the 3 people concerned and to give them 2 weeks notice and then to give the an additional 2 weeks pay. They were not long time employees (around a year) but i thought they deserved a little extra. We also asked if they would like to leave immediately or if they would like to work out the time. They all decided they wanted to work out the time.

However, not everything went smoothly. One of the employees decided that the reason the changes were being made was because we were closing down part of the business and therefore proceeded to inform the customers that we were doing this. Unfortunately this was not true and he didnt follow the established procedure of getting sign off before sending out communications.

Once we found out what he had been doing, we immediately let him go and patched up he misunderstanding with the affected customers.

So what did i learn?

• Once you have made a decision, move fast.  There is no reason to delay the inevitable.
• Have an open discussion with the affected employees – there should be no secrets and most people are understanding when you outline what is happening
• When letting people go, make sure that you look after them to the best of you ability – either pay them a little extra or help them find a new role through outplacement services – they are people and they deserve to be treated with respect
• Once you have informed someone of the changes, you should probably have them leave immediately.
• If you choose to keep people around for a period of time – watch them like a hawk.
• Once they leave, make sure that you review their emails to see what has happened and ensure that they have no further access to the business
• FInally – treat people with respect!

Letting people go is hard … but if you have to do it, do it right!