Recession dramatically changes employment practices
June 26, 2009
The CBI and recruitment specialists Harvey Nash have carried out research into the current working environment in the UK, and have found there have been quite dramatic changes due to the economic climate. The survey was carried out on 704 companies, covering 3 million employees across the country.
A key move by many businesses is the attempts to work with the workforce to reorganise working patterns and payments in order to save money rather than make more redundancies than are absolutely necessary. Examples of measures used to save money by altering the workplace are cutting overtime or overtime rates, giving extended leave to employees, shorter working weeks or more flexible working patterns.
One company that has worked very closely with employees on this is Axa PPP Healthcare. Recent news reports indicated that the company had written to its employees to give them a choice between cutting pay across the company or cutting up to 300 jobs. The questionnaire also asked which other cost cutting exercises staff would prefer, including things like cutting the Christmas party, taking away car parking allowances or turning air conditioning off.
The CBI research indicated that many companies are freezing pay increases and recruitment drives in order to try to consolidate during the difficult period. In my organisation overtime has been used as a one off low cost way of clearing a backlog of work whilst avoiding increasing headcount.
One area in which companies are not freezing altogether is in training and development, although those holding budgets and planning training are having to be much more careful with the way they carry out plans and implement budgets.
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