Our company is restructuring several departments to create a combined service for efficiency and customer focus to the business. The restructure will actually create vacancies, so there will be a position for everyone involved. Essentially there are 5 teams. 2 of the teams are staying as they are (A&B), 2 teams are created from existing teams where there there will be some additional positions at different levels but essentially skills and expertise remain the same (C&D), and one team is being completely renamed with revised job descriptions (E). Most of the job specs are being renamed and standardised to fit into the new business process/structure.
All staff except A&B will have new job descriptions.
The managers wish to promote some existing staff into new positions.
Additionally some of the team D have found out salaries of some of the positions in teams A & B are saying that they want to apply for these jobs (even though they would not have the skills) as they feel that these are higher and a progression for them, and are very annoyed.
With this restructure essentially the posts under their current job description are being made redundant, but the jobs themselves are being renamed with amended duties, some with salary changes for consistency in line with what the business requires.
I think my questions are: do I have to treat these as redundancies or can there just be the individual consultations to further discuss the structure and show where their current job maps across to the new position? We do not want anyone to feel that this is unfair, however team A & B jobs are not really up for discussion as there is a post for each person very similar to their own.
Is it more about the skill of whoever holds the consultation meetings to gain agreement from the employee as to where they think that person should sit?
Should I treat team E as a redundancy situation or just consult on their changes and obtain their agreement. There may also be opportunity to take a senior post within this team (I presume that if there are more people in this team who want to take a senior post, that we would interview or can I just discuss scoring with them) – what if they refuse!
Do we have to show all jobs that would be part of the proposed structure, even if line managers are confident that existing staff will map across to those roles? If staff want to apply for jobs across teams, should this post then be up for interview to include the (current) post holder?
We are going into group consultation to explain about the restructure in September and will be holding individual consultations subsequently. There are around 70 staff who would be affected.
Any advice or help would be very much appreciated as I am only two months in post and want to get it right and do seem to be getting a bit in a muddle!
T Knight, Assoc CIPD
