Selection Criteria

I am a manager and have been notified that my post is at risk of redundancy and I have been informed that I am the only person who is in this position. I was very surprised that I was chosen and have a first consultation meeting on Monday. From what I have been told the decision was made outside of my location without consultation with anyone in the local office , I am in London my manager is in New York and their manager in LA. I have only reported to this manager since November and have had 3 other managers in the last 12 months.

I believe the reason I have been selected is purely financial as I am a relatively high earner and the company believe they can make a big saving by cutting my role. My grievance is that I don't believe my role should be made redundant and I don't think anyone involved in the decision is close enough to know my role and hence I don't think they would be in a position to decide whether it should be made redundant as there is no lack of work currently. In addition I am undertaking work for other parts of the organisation where owing to staff departures they have no one to perform these duties. I have been with the company for 8 years and I don't believe that my duties can readily be performed by any of my team members though management may think differently.

Would somebody be able to offer me any advice in terms of whether I may have a case against unfair potential redundancy and how best I should put forward my case, is it best to do this verbally or in writing during the selection meeting or is there another way of approaching this.

Ok so this has moved on now and I have had 2 consultations meetings however I have still not been given any selection criteria in writing and have only been told verbally that the reason for my role being at risk is because it is believed that my position is 3/4 quarters a management role. I have submitted 2 supporting documents the first which states the reasons I believe I should have been selected in a pool and the second a document with a breakdown of my tasks from 2009 showing that my management role is around a quarter of what I do which backs up what I said in the first document that on the whole I do a similar role to 4 other colleagues.

It seems to me I have to document and back up what I say where as the decision makers on the other side have not had to back up the little they have said. It seems they is little weight to their decision.

Am I going about things the right way, what if anything should my next course of action be?

You are doing fine so far.

Just a couple of general points:

Firstly, just because there is work for a person to do doesn't mean making them redundant wouldn't be fair. Redundancies can be purely a cost-saving measure rather than because there just isn't enough work. Obviously the two are often linked, but not always. So the fact that someone is busy isn't necessarily relevant.

Secondly, you said in your first post that you feel you have only been selected because you are a high earner, to save the company as much money as possible. Although using salary level as a selection criteria for redundancy isn't good practice for lots of reasons (including potential age discrimination issues as older more long-serving staff tend to be earning more), it's not necessarily unfair. There could be a situation for example where there are 10 staff doing the same job, but not all earning the same money. All else being equal, if by dismissing those earning the most, more jobs could be saved, that could potentially be fair.

Having said that, it doesn't sound that clear cut and open a process with you.

Your redundancy might be unfair if you have been selected unfairly - ie you think someone else should have been selected instead and/or unfair criteria were used or were applied unfairly. Your redundancy might also be unfair if it was not a genuine redundancy situation, which could be demonstrated by your employer immediately recruiting someone else in your place, for example.

You having plenty of work to do doesn't mean that it isn't a redundancy situation, it just means that in your opinion the business would be better off keeping you. But if the Powers That Be have decided they need to cut costs and have decided to do this by reducing staff numbers, what happens to your workload once you've gone is their problem.

Your best bet in terms of any kind of case is about selection and process used, and you should focus on those things rather than whether you think their decision to make you/anyone redundant is sensible or justified from a workload point of view.

It sounds from your second post as though you believe you should have been part of a pool of 5 employees doing similar roles, with proper selection criteria applied to those individuals in order to select which would be made redundant. It sounds as though you are doing everything you can to back that up which is great.

It also sounds as though your employer isn't doing everything they should, in terms of providing proper information or consulting properly about the situation.

Now that you have put your own information forward as part of the record, the next thing, assuming they confirm your redundancy, will be to construct an appeal document, outlining why you feel your selection was unfair and including details of how a fair process was not followed. That would ideally involve stating what a fair process would have been and comparing that to what actually happened, to emphasise the difference between the two.

Have a look at ACAS' guidance for employers on redundancies. There's lots in there about good practice as well as legal requirements. If your employer has gone against ACAS recommended good practice in any way you can include this in an appeal even though the law might not have technically been broken.

http://www.acas.org.uk/CHttpHandler.ashx?id=877&p=0

Ideally your appeal document should demonstrate that if a fair and reasonable process was used, someone else would have been selected, for obvious reasons. There may not be a lot of point appealing it purely on the basis of process if the outcome would have been the same anyway, because it would be unlikely to be worth taking any such case to a tribunal. Unfair dismissal compensation is about financial loss, so if by using a fair procedure you would have been redundant anyway, your loss incurred by your employer not using a fair procedure is nil.

Thank you Eleanor for the detailed response.

Today after 2 weeks at a final consultation meeting I was informed that my role was being made redundant. I was not at any time provided with written selection criteria and was only told verbally that it was believed that 75% of my role was management which is why I was the only one selected. I documented supporting evidence to show this was not the case (my management role is closer to 25%) and on that basis should have been selected with others performing the same role. There was been no further response from the decision makers since I submitted this document.

I am now entitled to appeal which I will do as I do not believe a fair process has been followed in that I don't think the company applied Selection Criteria and secondly I was not given anything in writing with regard to what Selection Criteria not been applied.

In addition today I was served with notice and supplied for the first some information on other internal jobs and was told "none were suitable" , is this not for me to decide and should I have not got info on these before I was served notice?


Is there any advice you can give me with regards how best to pursue an appeal and the grounds for doing so.

Your employer should certainly offer you 'suitable employment' elsewhere in the organisation, and if they don't, it's likely to be unfair dismissal. They should also ensure that during this period you have access to all vacancies in the company.

In terms of an appeal, lack of proper selection criteria, failure to consult you in terms of giving you information about proposed selection criteria and giving you an opportunity to comment on those, and failure to inform you of any and all vacancies within the organisation are all things you should include.

Go through my earlier link carefully, and identify any areas where your employer didn't follow either legal requirements or best practice as set out by ACAS. Quote sections of the ACAS document if appropriate.

Make sure the appeal document is as facts-based as possible, focuses on procedure, and can be easily understood by someone with no prior knowledge of the situation. Use lots of bullets, sections and anything else that makes it very easy to follow.

Thanks again however I am unclear why you think I should be offered suitable employment elsewhere in the organisation as the company have stated that they are restructuring and reviewing staffing levels under what situations would suitable employement elsewhere in the organisation apply.

The whole of the consultation period was focussed on my current role and the perception of what I do, I did make suggestions as to how redundancy could be avoided but there was no response or discussion of those suggestions.

Anyone being made redundant should be offered suitable alternative employment if it's available. If costs need to be saved in your office or your department, but there is something suitable for you nearby on a similar salary, the employer should offer you that. It may be that there is nothing, as your employer says, which is fine.

As well as an obligation to find you suitable employment elsewhere if possible, to avoid making you redundant, your employer should make sure you are aware of any vacancies so that you can apply for them if necessary/appropriate.

I am currently forming an appeal document and one thing that has come to my mind is that I work with an offshore team in India who are contracted to do work for us. My thinking on this is that the company could have offerred me the role/work done by this team again this my come back to management perception of what my role is. This was never discussed as an option but surely they should be looking to remove contract rather than permanent roles. There may be additional complexity here owing to the fact that the cost center is different to my own but I am not sure if the decision to make my role redundant was solely based on cost saving.

You should put that in your appeal document as a possibility that they could have considered, however they would not be legally obliged to give you that work.

Even if the nature of the work would make it suitable for you, it's not currently available as a vacancy. It is currently being done elsewhere, contracted out to an external supplier, (presumably because it is cheaper to do so than to employ someone/people in this country to do it). It also may well not be as simple as immediately terminating that arrangement in any case. By all means include it as a suggestion that could have been considered, but not as a legal obligation.

If you have reason to believe there are other reasons they wish to make you redundant not related to cost-saving and you haven't been informed of those, you could include that. Either as a procedural problem in terms of failing to adequately explain the reason for your redundancy, or, depending on what those other reasons might be, an illustration that the redundancy may not be genuine.

I was informed yesterday that my role had been made redundant concluding the consultation phase. However I have been informed by another manager that he is discussing my moving to his team in a different role which is something I proposed in my first response.

In light of this information how can the company have ended the consultation, made my role redundant and served notice.

A transition to this role was not discussed at all during the consultation phase and the failure to consider alternative employment is one of my appeal grounds.