Restructuring Tips

I attended an FCB Seminar yesterday, check out their website below.

http://www.fcbgroup.com.au/

These breakfast seminars have been of a continuous high quality and I would highly recommend you attend one in the future if you get the chance. If only for the opportunity to engage in the roundtable discussions with professionals from varying industries on ideas/plans you might have for your own business units – you may find someone who had been in your situation only a few months ago. Often presented by lawyers, you will also find they back up nearly every piece of advice with an actual case study.

The session was on "Optimising Business Efficiencies During an Economic Downturn" and the roundtable I attended was "Change Management and optimising workplace culture in difficult economic times". However there were other roundtables on Industrial Disputes and OHS.
Two notable points I took from the session were:

1. During a restructure be careful with your terminology. When communicating with employees you should refer to the structure as a “proposed” one. This is to ensure you allow employees the chance to comment and communicate on the restructure. If the restructure was to result in the redundancy of a position, the potentially to be retrenched employee should have the opportunity to present a business case to challenge the change. If you communicate restructures as stated fact from the get go you could be at risk of appearing to not have a genuine consolation with staff.

2. Something I had not thought of before – incentivising handovers. Sometimes handovers, particularly if the result of a restructure and or redundancies can increase the risk of poor information transfer if the leaving employee is disgruntled. Incentivising handovers linked to KPI’s could alleviate this by giving the employee a clear benefit to conducting a proper handover. A secondary effect of this is it formalises the handover process, something that particularly important to help avoid knowledge loss. A handover process does not need to be incentivized to make it formalised obviously, it is just a bi-product.

The six competencies to inspire HR professionals for 2012

This material was passed on to my by a colleague of mine.


http://www.hrmagazine.co.uk/hr/features/1020649/exclusive-the-competencies-inspire-hr-professionals-2012


It's an interesting piece on the six key competencies needed for HR Professionals. 

1. Strategic Positioner
2. Credible Activist
3. Capability Builder
4. Change Champion
5. Human Resource Innovator and Integrator
6. Technology Proponent
   

These are the themes driving the above competencies. They are intended with to align with the above competencies - the Strategic positioner for example needs to think and act form the outside/in in order to coordinate strategic solutions.

1. outside/in: HR must turn outside business trends and stakeholder expectations into internal actions
2. business/people: HR should focus on both business results and human capital improvement
3. individual/organisational: HR should target both individual ability and organisation capabilities
4. event/sustainability: HR is not about an isolated activity (a training, communication, staffing, or compensation programme) but sustainable and integrated solutions
5. past/future: respect HR's heritage, but shape a future
6. administrative/strategic: HR must attend to both day-to-day administrative processes and long-term strategic practices.

I may discuss this in more detail in further posts. In the mean time, the above link should give you plenty to think about.

I'm back!

Well it's been a long time since posts...

I'm excited to say however that this blog will be resurrected! I will be making posts fortnightly to begin with and we will see how we go from there.

The topics will be related to HR in some way and over the coming weeks I will begin to make edits to the blog and side documents as it searches for a new identity.

Jack