It was a sad day today at work. We had a number of redundancies take place, in the typical sudden one day's notice sort of scenario. To make it worse, all the people who were made redundant were people I work with every day and one of them was my boss, mentor and friend for two of my four years at Avaya. As much as I tried to ignore it and get on with work, it was a hard and painful day and its probably going to difficult for a while.
Redundancy isn't always a bad thing, especially if you've been there for a while. The payout is typically quite substantial and if your timing is accurate, you can potentially move jobs and effectively get paid a bonus to quit. The people that were leaving are top performers who wanted to move on and they volunteered to leave so good on them! I'm sure they did the redun-dance when they found out they were approved to leave.
If you think about it from a economic stand point, having more voluntary redundancies made available to be negotiated is a great thing. All companies have staff who want to be somewhere else, but stick around for the money. Typically people become bored and want to move on because their skill set isn't effectively utilized by the firm. Its in their best interest to move on to another role/firm, and its in the company's best interest to give them a good reason to leave so that they can use that person's headcount to hire people who are more suitable for the strategy in play. And even if its not a skill set problem, just being at the same place for too long can kill your drive and this is bad for you and the firm.
From a personal standpoint, its a bit of a 50/50 affair. Whilst you do lose that person as a comrade-in-arms in the company, what you are actually gaining is potential contacts for new job placement. Peers within the firm are typically useless for ensuring promotion, but if they leave they can have (depending on their eventual role) a great potential impact in your ability to find jobs 'on the outside'. Whilst in the near future this isn't a relevant point for me, I'm sure it'll come in handy at some point.
1 comment:
First, a clarification: The redundancy payout chart that you link to is limited in scope to people working under a NSW award. Most people in R&D aren't working under such an award.
There's a downside risk with voluntary redundancies. You might find that the people that take them up are the ones that think they can get another job quickly. They are happy to grab the bonus for taking that risk. Meanwhile the people who remain are worried about their chances in the job market.
Voluntary redundancies may prompt your best people to leave, while retaining your... err... less best.
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