Managing people

It’s important to check in with your teams regularly, ensuring there are plenty of avenues of communication. Choose the tools which work best for your teams, some organisations use video calls and direct messenger to avoid large volumes of email, others find that creating WhatsApp groups for various different projects allows effective and timely communication.           

Daily contact with your team is a great way to check on each other’s wellbeing and stay in contact. Schedule a coffee meeting for the same time each day and try to spend some time talking about non-work related things too. This is important in the building of trust and familiarity.           

It’s important that all expectations and requirements are clear, timed and well communicated. Don’t agree a deadline of 'as quickly as possible', be instead be specific and use calendars to effectively manage project deadlines. The more prepared and advised your team are, the better they will perform.           

By setting up standard, working from home guidelines, such as: emails must be responded to within 24 hours, use text for urgent matters, no calls after certain hours, you won’t need to keep repeating expectations. They will become the norm.            

If flexible working is possible for your teams, understand every one will approach this differently. Some employees will work best in the morning, others late in the evenings. Try to factor this in to any plans and ensure that team meetings or workshops are at times that work for everyone. This should include non-compulsory meetings and those less formal catch ups. It’s important that every feels part of the team even if they’re working different hours.            

Exploring new ideas will be challenging because it typically happens in a room with whiteboards, sticky notes and people bouncing ideas around. It is possible to recreate these sessions with online collaboration tools such as Slack and Microsoft Teams. Test and find those that work best for your team.           

Successful remote working relationships are built on trust and the management of performance, not presenteeism.           

It is important to trust your people to do the work based on the expectations you’ve set. Don’t worry as much about what is being done and instead, concentrate on what is being accomplished.           

Swap an email or instant message for a video or phone call to make it more personal and help overcome feelings of isolation. Consider havin a Friday Funday where you all take part in a quiz, take turns to share some positive news, do group exercises or craft classes throughout the week.           

If you have concerns about the mental wellbeing of any of your colleagues, it’s important to seek relevant support.            

For more support, visit:           

• NHS mental health helplines
• Mental health foundation

There are 3 steps to demonstrate a fair redundancy process:                

1. Employees to be placed at risk of redundancy must be fairly selected (ideally using objective criteria)
2. They must be warned of the redundancy and the reasons for it must be explained
3. Employees must be allowed the opportunity to consider and comment on the employer’s proposals, such as their selection, as well as suggesting alternative roles that may be available, during a consultation process

There is no set statutory procedure for a small-scale redundancy, but typically a redundancy process will consist of:                

• 3 meetings with each individual at risk of redundancy; these meetings should take place over a period of seven to ten days
• the first meeting is generally used to place the individual at risk of redundancy, explain the reasons for this and to advise them of the consultation process
• at the second meeting the employee should be allowed to provide any suggested alternatives to redundancy for consideration and the employer should consider suitable alternative roles that might be available
• if by the third and final meeting there is no suitable alternative role and the decision is that the employee’s role is redundant, this should be confirmed in writing; and employees should be advised that they can appeal against the decision (in which case an appeal meeting should take place)

While in most cases employees will be financially better off agreeing to the furlough scheme as opposed to selecting redundancy, there may be some long-standing employees, or those who have large contractual redundancy payments, where redundancy is a preferable option.                

Employers should bear in mind that at the end of the furlough scheme they may need to reassess business needs and some furloughed employees may become redundant at that time.                

For business that are still operating, e.g. where employees can work and cannot be furloughed), there may still be a reduction in business and a need to reduce staff and costs. In these circumstances there are other alternatives to the furlough scheme or redundancies worth considering. While this contractual term is not common and is generally restricted to specific industries (such as manufacturing), some employers have a contractual right to “lay-off” workers or put them on “short-time working”. This means that employers can force employees to stop working with no pay or reduce their hours to temporarily reduce staff costs.                

Where employers do not have contractual “lay-off” or “short time working” provisions, they may want to consider requesting employees accept a temporary cut in working hours and associated cut in salary, and/or requesting employees to agree a reduction in salary without an associated cut in working hours. Because these changes will mean a change to the terms of employees’ contracts they will need to be agreed in advance with each employee.                

Whatever a small business decides to do about redundancy, honest and open dialogue with your employees can make a significant difference. Employees are more likely to accept temporary changes to their employment terms if they are well-informed about the challenges, difficulties and pressures the business faces, and the steps the business is taking to protect their jobs by keeping the business afloat.