Brief
Since December 2012, this company has had approximately 3,375 excess staff in need of redeployment or outplacement.
The client’s major objectives related to these staff were:
- To help them find employment; and
- To reduce their AU$5,000 outplacement cost.
Our team stepped in to offer a service with two major components:
Redeployment
- A period of four weeks (six for site closures) in which affected staff who had been given notice of retrenchment were supported in every application they actively made themselves internally.
- This included placement into roles to which they matched and had applied for on hold, and gaining feedback before proceeding.
Outplacement
- The range of services we provided to affected staff enabled them to take control of their career and/or transition to an alternative, such as retirement or starting a business.
Results
- Our team was able to offer this service for AU$1,350 per staff member, rather than the AU$5,000 the client had paid previously.
- For 3,375 staff members, this represented cost savings of $12.3 million.
- A further unanticipated benefited was cost avoidance, which was not a major factor to the client when it undertook this process. However, cost avoidance has been far more significant than the cost savings.
- While more than 2,400 staff were outplaced with redundancy payments, 957 people were redeployed internally.
- At an average cost of $100,000 per redundancy (based on figures from the client’s HR department), this represents cost avoidance of $95.7 million.
By undertaking this process, the client created advocacy, retained skills and knowledge, and ensured that its statutory obligations were met. This process also resulted in better information to defend unfair against dismissal claims and to test whether redundancies were genuine. Moreover, the bottom line benefit was significant:
| Savings |
$12.3 million |
| Cost avoidance |
$95.7 million |
| Total Bottom Line Benefit |
$108 million |
