Redundancy?

[CedarTree]

I was hoping for some legal advise with something I am going through at the moment.

I work for a company with 200+ employees and have been with them for 19 months. I was doing really well and got promoted to a more senior role with a decent pay-rise 7 months ago (a year into the job). 4 months ago I was asked to move to a different team, which sounded like a great challenge but it did mean a more or less new job. New manager, new team and new overseas clients. The only thing that remained the same was the company. I can't lie, the last 4 months have been challenging, I had to settle into an established team as a leader, I had to work with an external contractor that has a reputation for being very difficult and a line manager that was too busy to be available. The contractor, who is a very senior figure who brings in a lot of income to the business proved to be the most challenging.

It started off straight away, the contractor would purposely cut me out of critical communications to my more junior colleagues within my team. At first I thought this would improve as I am clearly the person to communicate with, but nothing happened. After a a month and a half I spoke to my line manager. My manager said this person was known to be challenging, we agreed I should try to address it myself. I eventually set up a lunch meeting where I challenged the contractor and said that in order for me to do the job properly we needed to start communicating with each other. Nothing improved. In the meantime our client close down for the whole month of August for the holiday period every year so we were naturally quiet during this time. After the summer break the contractor started to exclude me from important overseas meetings as well, claiming that other colleagues were more relevant to bring. I challenge this to no avail.

During this time I had an informal performance review with my line manager (6 months since my formal review). We discussed my objectives and set a few - Where improving my relationship with the contractor was one, but there was no specific issues raised around my performance at all. The day after my review my line manager and the contractor called me into a meeting saying that I was being removed from my role with this client and moved to manage an imminent pitch and potential new business, but that this would be agreed in a board meeting two weeks later.

The contractors exclusions of me continued and I had a call again where I said that it needed to include me, I cannot do my job properly and lead the team without the full picture. The month that followed was extremely confusing, they had the board meeting, but when nothing was communicated around a decision I had to ask my line manager. I was told it was business as usual, i.e. I was leading the team. When the contractor continued his exclusions I saw no other option than to use my line manager to start handling these conversations. Over the last week or so things have improved after we got to a situation where we were at risk of not being able to deliver work on time because the contractor had loaded junior colleagues with too much work and they consequently couldn't cope.

A couple of days ago I was called into a meeting with HR and my line manager where they said that due to my performance to date and the resulting lack of growth and direction for my clients with regards to internal and external stakeholders, the current business need dictates a diminished requirement for your role within the team, meaning my role is potentially at risk of redundancy. They went through a range of issues around my performance and that this was the reason for my redundancy. Is this right? I mean either you are redundant or you are sacked due to performance issues and the processes for these are dramatically different? This redundancy meeting was the first I had heard of any performance issues, and I also question whether issues about performance even belong in a redundancy meeting?

To be honest I am quite happy to leave this company but I do think that the company's failure to address these almost bullying tactics by a contractor from the start, the fact that I have continually tried to address this, and them stating that I am under performing mainly because I haven't formed great working relationships with the contractor during my 4 months in the role, makes it unfair dismissal.

An interesting factor in this is that the company recruit for my role all the time, there is no role live on the website at the moment, but I suspect they will advertise soon, is there a length of time before they can advertise it?

Thank you.

[mariefab]

Re: Redundancy?

The fact is that the business that this difficult contractor brings is more important to the company than one employee (even though he's a pain).
If the company wants to dress up your dismissal as a redundancy, this is to your advantage.
It's better to write on a job application that your last role ended due to redundancy than because of performance issues.
If you co-operate you are more likely to get them to agree to give you a good reference.

[CedarTree]

Re: Redundancy?

I'm totally with you on all of this.

I just feel it's very unfair and somehow want to 'clear' my name. I feel that I have done everything I can to rectify the issues (I had an informal meeting with the HR manager a week or so ago and she confirmed that I was doing everything right in dealing with the contractor). I also need to understand if I have a claim to ask them for some money in compensation as I will struggle financially without a job.

And then it is the way they have handled this - if it is a redundancy, why would they even mentioned these performance issues?
And if there were issues why was this not raised in my performance review meeting a month ago.

They have promised a good reference already.

[mariefab]

Re: Redundancy?

If your employment is ended by reason of redundancy; the only ones you would need to clear your name with would be your current employers.
Given that they want to get rid of you to placate this known pain of a contractor, what do you care what they think of you. You're hardly likely to ever want to go back there in the future after this experience.

I'm afraid that you aren't entitled to any compensation because you haven't worked there for 2 years.
So, they could dismiss you without giving any reason at all if they wished.
That said, if you think that they would prefer you to leave quietly without calling them out on the 'redundancy' you could ask if there's any kind of settlement on offer.

You are entitled to your notice period (or pay in lieu) and payment for any accrued untaken holiday entitlement.

In a way it is a performance issue. You've indicated that in order to do your job properly you need to be able to communicate with the contractor. It's not your fault that you can't because, despite your efforts to resolve matters, the contractor won't co-operate and your employer is not prepared to tell him that he must engage with you.
Comfort yourself with the likelihood that, if the contractor learns about this, he'll become even worse in future and happily that won't be your problem.