Unfair redundancy

[govson]

Hi,

I need your valuable advice about my redundancy which happened on 30^th Nov, 20.
I worked for an IT company and completed 2 years 5 month, who made large redundancy to cut the cost and move some of our jobs to offshore. They used a selection matrix which is based on competency skills, daily routine tasks and IT processes around it.

I had internally appeal based on the following point which was rejected

1. Unfair pool: - They select 5 people in our pool and three people would be at risk. We were three different sets of people who had different job profile like system operation (2 person), application expert (2 people) and consultant (1 people) who work for one customer. When HR announced the pool and shared selection matrix, 4 out 5 objected to selection matrix as this was suiting to system operation people (including me and another colleague). We also said there should three different pool and consultant should not be part of this pool as he not manaing same customer as other 4 people deals. But HR ignored our request and they slightly tweaked the matrix but still application experts were not happy. But when they announced the score, they put system operation (2, including me), application expert (1) at the risk. It was very surprising, they selected consultant who had no major contribution to the team on daily activities which I could prove by data statistics. He is the oldest(25yrs) employee of the company among the pool members. The company might save a lot of money by not making him redundant which all of us pool members understand.

1. Unjustified scoring: Company used two scorers. First scorer my line manager and Second scorer another team manager who does not supervise any of the pool members in any capacity. My line manager gave me a good score (80%). The second scorer gave me 35% score. During consultation meeting, they did not justify the scoring from the second scorer and also did not invite him to any of the three consultation meetings despite my request to them. I also challenged them with all the evidence against each matrix point where he did not score.

There was also a flaw in the calculation of scoring by the second scorer for one of the key points which used to calculate the final weighted score. HR accepted the mistake and corrected after the first consultation which has brought up my score significantly to 70% but they still said I was a low scorer and still at risk. I can’t believe them as there was no transparency in these scores, it is done by two managers and HR.

3. Insufficient information and support from Management :
Despite multiple requests to rescore on the basis of the evidence provided by me, management has failed to support and to share sufficient information proving the justification and unbiased redundancy procedure. Also, I have been forced to close the consultation and my queries without addressing my concerns

4. Disregard to annual performance review held in April 2020:The redundancy procedure, as explained by the management, reflects the assessment and observation of the Panel based on the work done in the past, however, no details have been provided, explaining the work in question.

My appeal was also rejected by senior director they said that the correct process was followed.
I think two of my ex-colleague (who were made redundant from the pool) can testimony for unfair pooling.

I feel that it is an unfair, unjust, and biased dismissal as my concerns were not addressed by the management throughout the consultation process.

I was very stressed for the last few months, so didn’t think about the next course of action.

Could you please advise what are my next option from here. ?

Thanks for reading my post.

Tags: redundancy, selection

[ULA]

Dismissal due to redundancy may have the potential to be an unfair dismissal and for which there are four potential issues which might need to be taken into consideration when deciding this. These are if:

* there was not a genuine redundancy situation
* there was unfair selection for redundancy
* there was inadequate consultation with the employee, or
* the employer fails to seek alternative work for the employee.

Given when you were made redundant if you did want to start a claim for unfair dismissal then you must do so 3 months less a day from the date of your termination. In the first instance you would need to submit an Early Conciliation Claim with ACAS within this timescale. Below is the link from which you can do this.

https://tell.acas.org.uk/check-user-wants-conciliation