Challenge

A leading international company asked Vista to assist with a large-scale organisational change project to support a refocus of their field sales delivery across the UK. This involved a restructure and redundancy of existing roles, creation of new roles and bringing third party support services in-house, involving two TUPE transfers and affecting over 130 employees.

Solution

The complexities and timescales involved were challenging and therefore Vista supported not only their HR team, but also their in-house legal counsel and management teams in the design and delivery of the change programme.

We provided a HR project lead and assigned a senior employment lawyer to work with their transformation lead on the design of the programme, identifying the key practical and legal issues and strategies in navigating three collective consultation processes running concurrently.

We supported the background legal work around the TUPE transfers and trained the HR and management teams, including providing them with reference materials so they had a full appreciation of the specific issues and their role in the programme. In addition to this, we drafted executive summary information for the Board and the communication materials for the various groups of employees involved. In preparation for the various stages of the process, we also prepared a variety of documents so that our client had advance visibility of what would be involved as the process progressed.

Following the company announcement of the organisational change project, we delivered training to the employee representatives and supported the company lead in the collective consultation meetings.

Although our client had originally envisaged their line managers undertaking the individual consultation meetings across the UK, they decided to have Vista conduct these instead. This allowed their managers to focus on the selection interviews for the new roles and the pathways forwards, knowing that the consultations were being conducted by experienced and empathetic experts.

Throughout the process our HR experts worked closely with the HR team, this had the additional benefit of providing development opportunities for their skills and knowledge in these areas.

Result

At the end of the project the Chairman of the company wrote personally to all the employees who had been made redundant. He received a reply from virtually all of them and every one of them expressed how well they felt the process had been handled and how well they had been treated, despite the impact upon their employment.