BT has had to significantly reduce staff numbers as a result of the recession but thanks to a new “transition centre” it has been able to redeploy thousands of employees, delegates at the CIPD's annual conference in Manchester heard.
The communications giant is no stranger to cost reduction pressures and, as a result, has been running voluntary redundancy schemes “pretty much every year since 1992”, according to Jenny Arwas, HR director, BT Group Functions.
But the new centre has meant that, although the organisation has taken 35,000 people (including contractors) out of the business since 2008, it has been able to redeploy 9,000 into new jobs.
“It was a turning point for us in 2008 when the financial crisis hit. We needed to take stock of where we were,” said Arwas. “We had a huge number of surplus people and we were doing a lot of hiring. We needed to get better at managing that.”
The transition centre, which is designed to help the company manage its surplus people better, focuses on matching employees with vacant positions, as well as skills development and assistance with writing CVs.
Arwas told delegates that prior to BT’s first voluntary redundancy programme in 1992 you were “more likely to die in service than be fired”. But that changed when 30,000 employees were let go in a single year. The experience left many employees who remained with the organisation unhappy.
BT learnt three key lessons from that programme, she said: “First, identify the skills you want to keep. We threw the baby out with the bathwater and found ourselves having to employ contractors. Second, we needed to engage in a way we had never done before and we didn’t know how; and third, we didn’t have the leaders: this was the first real test for our leaders.”
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The communications giant is no stranger to cost reduction pressures and, as a result, has been running voluntary redundancy schemes “pretty much every year since 1992”, according to Jenny Arwas, HR director, BT Group Functions.
But the new centre has meant that, although the organisation has taken 35,000 people (including contractors) out of the business since 2008, it has been able to redeploy 9,000 into new jobs.
“It was a turning point for us in 2008 when the financial crisis hit. We needed to take stock of where we were,” said Arwas. “We had a huge number of surplus people and we were doing a lot of hiring. We needed to get better at managing that.”
The transition centre, which is designed to help the company manage its surplus people better, focuses on matching employees with vacant positions, as well as skills development and assistance with writing CVs.
Arwas told delegates that prior to BT’s first voluntary redundancy programme in 1992 you were “more likely to die in service than be fired”. But that changed when 30,000 employees were let go in a single year. The experience left many employees who remained with the organisation unhappy.
BT learnt three key lessons from that programme, she said: “First, identify the skills you want to keep. We threw the baby out with the bathwater and found ourselves having to employ contractors. Second, we needed to engage in a way we had never done before and we didn’t know how; and third, we didn’t have the leaders: this was the first real test for our leaders.”