Redundancy
is a challenging, emotionally-charged process that no business leader or owner
wants to face. However, the Coronavirus pandemic has brought challenges to all organisations
from large corporates to the smallest SMEs, and for many, restructuring and
redundancy may be the only option.

In
times of crisis, businesses go through three phases – Survive, Reset, Thrive.

The
survive phase saw us all getting by day by day to get the job done, in many
cases supported by the Government’s COVID-19 furlough scheme to keep staff in
employment.

Most
businesses will have now moved on to the Reset
phase. This is where plans must be developed, and very difficult decisions
made, to put the organisation in the best possible position to thrive in the
future.

Unfortunately,
there may be a need for fundamental changes to staffing – and support from
expert redundancy HR specialists can be required to achieve this. Even large
companies with their own HR teams may require specialist
restructuring and redundancy HR support, particularly if they are
preparing to make a large number of redundancies.

Before
taking any action, it is crucial to understand what redundancy means, the legal
process required, and the pitfalls that can be encountered along the way.

What are
restructuring and redundancy?

This
may sound like a straightforward question, but many employers struggle to
understand it. First of all, there is no legal definition of restructuring and
redundancy and the term restructuring may in fact cover a range of options such
as reduced hours, lay-offs and changes to pay and contracts that stop short of
redundancy.

As
many businesses seek to cut staff costs due to the impact of Coronavirus, it’s
important to understand that businesses do not make a ‘person’ redundant
– it is the role they perform that is now no longer required. This means in
order to make a job redundant, there must be a reduction in the requirement for
the work to be carried out, a business closure, or the closure of a workplace.
You should also consider alternatives to restructuring and redundancy before
you begin.

What
are the alternatives to restructuring and redundancy?

Redundancy
should be a last resort, and there are a number of alternatives that should be
considered. Many will require the agreement of employees, but in the difficult
circumstances we all face because of COVID-19 you may find that staff are
agreeable to change if it means they remain in employment.

Not
every solution will be right for every business but you may consider pay
freezes or cuts, a temporary deferral in pay, a cut in hours, and unpaid
sabbaticals. When considering restructuring or redundancy you should also look
at whether it is possible to redeploy one or more employees to another part of
the business. Sometimes an external eye – such as an outsourced HR provider –
can help with identifying these alternatives and spot opportunities you may
have missed.

If
there are no viable alternatives or employees do not accept the offer of a
change to hours, pay or terms, then redundancy may be a fair reason for
dismissal. It is crucial that fair and legally sound processes are followed –
again, an employer or in-house HR team may need support from an external HR
provider to support with this.

A fair
redundancy process – consultation is key

From
the largest corporates to the smallest businesses, the same rules of redundancy
apply. In large companies which may be making a significant number of redundancies,
it is essential that a thorough consultation process – including collective
consultation where relevant – is carried out meticulously and fairly. Getting
this process wrong can be expensive and risks exposure to employment tribunals
and reputational damage.

If you
intend to make 20 or more employees redundant within any 90-day period at a
single place of work, then you must follow collective consultation rules which
require a consultation period of 30 days (45 days if the number of employees being
made redundant is 100 or more). There is no set consultation period for
employers proposing to make fewer than 20 redundancies but it is good practice
to consult, and a tribunal could decide that a member of staff has been
unfairly dismissed if they were not consulted or if the consultation was not
adequate.

When
selecting employees for potential redundancy, you must be scrupulously fair. Of
course, selection must not discriminate on the grounds of any protected
characteristics such as age, race, religion, sex or sexuality.

Usually
candidates are “scored” on performance – their output or quality of work,
attendance, and disciplinary records. This can be a complex process and may be
subject to a challenge by an employee – so often to ensure complete compliance,
objectivity and impartiality, this process is run by an external HR provider
that specialises in restructuring and redundancy.

Restructuring
and redundancy for employees on the Coronavirus furlough scheme

Staff
who are on furlough may
still be dismissed on the grounds of redundancy. However, businesses should be
wary of making redundancies as soon as the furlough period ends as HMRC may interpret
that the intention was to make the redundancies all along.

It’s
important to note that despite the existence of the furlough scheme, all normal
employment rules, including the need for redundancy consultation, are still in
effect.

If
furloughed staff are not at work then meaningful consultation must take place –
either bring them safely into the workplace, or carry it out by phone or video
call.

If you
do make an employee redundant, then you will need to calculate their statutory
redundancy payment. This is based on a number of factors including their pay,
length of service and age. Redundancy payments are based on the employee’s full
salary – not the reduced amount paid through the furlough scheme. An employer
must meet the cost of this payment – it cannot be claimed through the job
retention scheme.

External
HR support for restructuring and redundancy

Restructuring
and redundancy is a complex process, especially taking into account the
additional factors of Coronavirus and the furlough scheme.

Even for
very large companies, it may be that internal HR teams need support from an
external HR team which specialises in redundancy. An external team can view
your workforce with an objective eye, identify alternatives to redundancy,
ensure consultation is carried out legally, fairly and sympathetically, and
advise on any potential issues your business may face as a result of the
process.

This
article was produced in association with Reality HR which
delivers bespoke HR services including restructuring and redundancy support to
a range of organisations through its team of CIPD qualified specialists.

Programmatic Ads
are an advancement in digital advertising that levels the playing field between
small and large competitors by automating the bidding process. It’s a concept
that cuts through and makes obsolete the manual bidding of ad placement. As
well as reducing the amount of time a marketing team spends placing online ads,
it can also target your most likely customers more effectively and provide you
with a better chance of getting ahead of the competition. 

Programmatic ads are an offering from the bright minds at Google.
Collectively, it’s Google DoubleClick Bid Manager, Display and Video 260 all
rolled into a single practice of ads management. 

By using the power of the data available on the internet,
programmatic ads is a way of using algorithms, instead of a manual system to
place ads. While the pay-per-click business model revolutionised online
advertising, it also necessitated the inefficient and time-consuming task of
bidding on where, when and how often a particular ad would appear. 

The new practice streamlines the bidding process by automating a
lot of the decisions and using various data such as interests, region, and
demographics to decide the best particular ad placement target audience. The
practice also uses AI to add additional focus to the process. 

Effective and Efficient Customer Targeting

Market ‘prospecting’ provides a hint to the often mediocre results
that occurred. In traditional marketing, prospecting referred to directly
contacting a demographic or region of potential buyers to gauge their acceptance
of a brand’s products or services. Depending on the level of this acceptance, a
marketing company would decide on whether launching an expensive ad campaign
would be financially worth the expense or effort. It was literally like digging
a hole to find out whether or not you struck gold. 

Although, the results were positive enough to warrant the
laborious effort of market prospecting, the hit or miss aspect of the exercise
was often frustrating, especially when time was often a consideration. Time spent
prospecting while the competition was employing other, more fruitful marketing
strategies, led to prospecting often being avoided if at all possible. 

Digital Assistance

But now, with the assistance of digital algorithms, and AI
enhancements to the process, prospecting is enjoying a resurgence. With the
lightning-quick speed that algorithms provide, prospecting is seen as just
another useful part of the process of finding the right audience appeal
to. 

By using historical data of a brand’s sales, programmatic ads
focus on the most likely buyers and narrows them down to the most likely
candidates out of those buyers to respond to a particular type of ad. It then
assigns a value to the ad. This value is then used in an automated bidding
process that knows whether to exceed or stay below a particular competing bid
in the purchase of ad space. 

Programmatic ads are revitalising the online advertising approach
for millions of advertisers. It helps small brands compete effectively against
larger brands in their industry and speeds up the entire ad bidding process.

Should you go with organic SEO created by a digital
marketing agency or purchase Google ads? If you’re interested in long-term
success, SEO is always the answer.

Granted, this route can lead to a massive return on your investment, but it’s not always easy to discern what are the best SEO practices to follow. There’s a lot of similar-sounding advice out there.

And while foundations of SEO will eventually
lead to the results you’re looking for – they’re not everything. In this
article, we would like to draw attention to a few ideas that you might not have
thought of yet or have neglected to use.

1. Fight Your Way to Featured Snippets

Sometimes, you need a 3,000-word article on a
topic, and other times you need a short sentence that contains essential
information. That’s why featured snippets are popular.

They’re right under the sponsored posts and
ads, answering the questions you’ve asked. The problem is that it’s not exactly
clear yet what’s the magic formula of getting your website into the featured
snippets ranking. But placing a question in the H1 title is a good practise.

So too is utilising the FAQ schema code that
indicates your post contains a question and answer format. But all of that is
useless without having the best possible content that provides concise answers.

2. Choose More Intuitive Title Tags

Everyone talks about keywords, and of course, this
is something that requires a lot of research and careful implementation in SEO.
But even if your content is premium and keywords are perfectly optimised, users
might skip your page.

This happens if the title tags sound confusing or
merely unappealing. This often happens when we lose sight of the fact that it’s
real people behind the screens.

Simple and straightforward title tags will get
more clicks than those that sound overly complicated and perhaps a bit
intimidating.

The “What Is…?” format is always going work,
even if you’ve used it thousands of times before, because that’s precisely what
people ask.

3. Transcribe Videos

In some instances, well-executed video content
is the absolute best choice to make. And it’s often the preferred choice among
users. However, in terms of boosting the return on your investment with SEO, it’s not the best option.

But it can be if you add a transcript of the
video content. Just because search engines still can’t read and analyse video
data, you need to move away from creating video content.

There are efficient and affordable tools online
that can help you with transcribing the videos. But if you make an extra effort
to edit those transcripts into blog posts, you’ll likely see even better results.

4. Focus on the Images

Images are important. A claim supported by the
fact that Google keeps a separate tab just for image searches. That’s why
taking the time to add descriptive tags and naming the image file might
significantly increase your chances of ranking higher on the SERP.

Another image-related tip would be to think
about the image size. High-quality images seem like an obvious choice, but
lighter image files might mean that the page will load faster.

You might benefit from searching for tools that
can help you preserve the image quality while compressing the file size as much
as possible.

5. If You Still Haven’t – Relocate to WordPress

WordPress might not be the only website
building platform, but when it comes to SEO, it’s the best choice. If you’re
looking to boost the return on your investment with SEO, WordPress has a lot of
useful and practical tools.

One of which is the Yoast plugin that can help
you make your page stand out when the search engine algorithms search for the best
results to present. Even the free Yost plugin version will provide sufficient
information for you to tweak your page to perfection.

Bonus Tip: Quality & Consistency

These two ideas go hand in hand when you want
to bank on your SEO practices. Reliable and long-lasting content is the absolute
key when it comes to choosing the right SEO investment.

Moving towards useful rather than trendy
content is always the right choice. But it’s also vital to point out that
consistency will pay off as well.

Consistency is noted among the algorithms too. Therefore,
if you choose a regular and consistent output of content, you’re likely to be
gain more traffic and start more conversations.

Return on Investment with SEO: Thinking Outside the Box

Whether you choose to hire a digital marketing
agency or another approach, the principles of return on investments are the
same. And yes, it’s a long-term investment, that sometimes seems a little bit
too unpredictable.

But if you try to implement some of these
unconventional ways to boost and expedite the return on your investment, you
could see tremendous growth faster than anticipated. But always keep in mind
that quality content comes before any other tool you can try.