Between now and the Governments furlough scheme ending, a lot of people are going to find themselves redundant or in a redundancy process. There are some estimates of the unemployment rate being 7.5% by the end of the year.
If you receive the dreaded, email, call, letter or even text message, then the following information might be useful.
I’ve summarised the redundancy process before.
https://myredundancyjourney.com/2020/07/17/a-summary-of-the-redundancy-process/
The BBC website also has an excellent summary.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-53501506
The UK.Gov website is also very useful.
(https://www.gov.uk/redundancy-your-rights).
Now is not the time to panic; you should be at the start of a process that will take between 7-14 days to go through. But it will help to get things in order as soon as you can. Get a plan together. Be prepared.
If you can, as close to the start of the process as possible……
- Know your rights and understand the process you should be going through.
- Throughout the process, make sure that everything is ‘fair’. If you feel it’s not, then get some advice about the best way to proceed. This could be a friend with HR knowledge, or something more formal (I’ll have a post about this asap).
- Record a timeline of events so that you have a clear idea to what happened when (this was mine https://myredundancyjourney.com/2020/07/20/my-redundancy-timeline/)
- Get recent copies of your terms of employment and your companies redundancy policy. Don’t assume that you already know these. They might have changed over time.
- Check your finances. Compare your outgoings against an estimate of your redundancy package and trim the fat if necessary. There’s a useful redundancy calculator at https://www.gov.uk/calculate-your-redundancy-pay.
- Check what benefits you might be entitled to claim.
- If you can, speak to your trade union and see if they can offer any short term help (advice, finance etc.) or long term help (retraining, help with job hunting, grants, career advice etc.).
- During the process, check everything. Financials, holiday days owing, length of service. Check everything and check often. Don’t assume that your company will get it correct.
- At some point, you’re going to need to start looking for a job so you’ll need the job seekers tool kit of access to the internet, CV, job site accounts, filtered email notifications, references, etc. Now is an excellent time to get that ball rolling. My resources page has a few ideas https://myredundancyjourney.com/resources/
Welcome to the ‘club’, I hope you don’t stay for long.
Welcome to my journey through redundancy 