by Richard Smith

Created on: July 11, 2008

It was a Friday afternoon in mid March 2005 and thoughts were drifting to the approaching night's debauchery and a weekend doing stuff with the kids when the little ping that tells me I have new mail went off on my PC. Given that in recent weeks my workload had reduced substantially and no new projects were on the horizon I was welcome of the distraction a new mail may bring, what I got was an invite to a meeting at 9.30 on the following Monday with the Director I reported to, no meeting agenda or subject and a very formal request for me to attend. It did not take a genius to work out what it was about, after al three weeks ago three of my team members received an identical message and the fact that their desks were now empty told its own story, a quick check with the remaining colleagues in my team and sure enough we all had a meeting at fifteen minute intervals on that Monday.

The Oxford Concise Dictionary defines redundancy as 1. inessential, superfluous, unnecessary. 2. no longer needed at work, jobless, out of work, unemployed. Well after Monday that was going to be me. Now it is not the nicest term but no matter how it is dressed up, out-sourced, down sized, career re-directed or whatever the latest buzz word from across the Atlantic it still means the same thing, your income is gone and for whatever reasons your employer no longer has need of your services.

The important thing to recognise is that redundancy impacts on people in many different ways and people will react to it differently. I have had the awful experience once of having to tell a group of people that they were redundant and within a room of thirty people some were in tears (that included me) whilst some were trying not to run around screaming for joy and shouting "show me the money". You see for some people redundancy can be a really positive thing, it gives them the reason to leave a job they do not like with a payout, they may qualify for an enhanced early retirement or they may just want to change direction completely whilst for others there is uncertainty, financial problems and feelings of abandonment from a company that they have worked hard for. Fortunately when it came to my own redundancy I was in the former group as it was something I had prepared myself for and even though the timing took me by surprise a little there was a sense of relief that I felt that weekend that the planning I had taken over the past couple of years were not in vain.

Having said that even I found that my

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