Background
An organisation dealing with the potential sale of a hospitality business and premises contacted Albany HR as they needed a trusted HR consultant to provide on-site support and guidance on the consultation and communication of the proposed sale to the affected employees. If the proposal proceeded all 35 Leadership Team and employee roles would be impacted.
Client Needs
Our Client needed sensitive, confidential, legally compliant, bespoke, and timely handling of the situation as their Leadership Team and all other employees in the organisation would be impacted should the proposal proceed. There was a requirement to keep the business operational during the consultation period and lead up to the proposed sale and closure of the business and the majority of the employees had client-facing responsibilities. The Leadership Team were felt to be the appropriate people to lead the consultation and communication processes, however, they had limited redundancy handling experience.
Solution
Our experienced HR Consultant met with and quickly established a trusted relationship with the Leadership Team and agreed an approach for initial business proposal communications, employee representative nominations and employee representative elections. Through this collaboration, we were able to establish the most effective consultation and engagement process which would meet legal and business requirements and ensure that employees were treated with care.
Our Albany HR Consultant was then on-site to support the communication of the business proposal, the nomination and election of representatives and the subsequent collective consultation meetings.
We ensured that the legal requirements of the process were met and supported by good management conversations which were essential for retention and engagement purposes.
Although all employees were due to leave by reason of redundancy, it was key that they remained in the business until the premises closed, so that guests could continue to be looked after. Having an experienced HR consultant on-site ensured that any attrition or legal risks were identified and resolved effectively and ensured that good responses could be made to employee questions and concerns.
Our HR consultant supported leaders in drafting answers for individual and collective employee questions and arranged to have a team from PACE attend the site to signpost redeployment and other support services to employees. We were able to deliver effective tools and training to ensure that the Leadership Team could lead collective and individual consultations, recording these correctly and following up as needed with appropriate conversations or letters.
Outcome
The organisation was able to support its employees empathetically and effectively through a challenging period, receiving positive feedback from employees on the support they felt from the organisation through this period of uncertainty and change. Employees felt engaged and remained with the organisation until their planned leave dates and any risks were identified and effectively mitigated. The business continued to run as planned during this period. The Leadership commented that they felt supported and were thankful for the support they had received from our HR Consultant.