The engagement
A restructure is difficult in any organisation. This one could not lawfully start.
I was engaged by a volunteer-governed organisation facing a restructure that would result in redundancies. That is hard work in any setting, and it is work that deserves to be done properly, because at the end of every process are people whose livelihoods change.
What made this engagement unusual was not the restructure itself. It was everything underneath it. Before a single consultation meeting could be scheduled, I had to establish two things the organisation did not have: a reliable account of what its own employees' terms actually were, and a clear answer to who had the authority to make a decision.
This case study deliberately does not walk through the mechanics of the restructure. It covers the two things that genuinely made the engagement complex, and the human support that ran alongside them.
Challenge one: no single point of truth
Different contracts, missing policies, and years of undocumented custom, all predating my engagement.
The organisation had accumulated its people documentation over years, with different people issuing different paperwork at different times and no HR function holding it together. What I inherited was a patchwork.
Contracts that did not match each other
Employees doing comparable work held materially different terms: different notice periods, different hours provisions, different benefit entitlements. None of it was deliberate. It was simply what had been issued at the time, by whoever issued it.
Policies missing or long out of date
Core policies were either absent entirely or written against employment law that had since moved on. There was no reliable redundancy policy, and no settled procedure to point to when people asked, quite reasonably, how this would work.
Custom and practice filling the gaps
Where documents were silent, years of informal practice had quietly become the real terms. Some of it was more generous than anything written down. All of it had to be identified rather than discovered mid consultation.
No version control, no single owner
Multiple versions of the same document existed with no way of knowing which governed. Establishing which version applied to which employee was painstaking, and it was non negotiable before anyone could be consulted fairly.
Unwinding this was the largest part of the work and the least visible. Every contract read line by line, every entitlement traced to its source, every gap identified and resolved to a defensible position. Only when there was one reconciled point of truth could consultation begin, because consultation built on unreliable facts is not consultation. It is an invitation to challenge, and it is unfair to the people sitting on the other side of the table.
Challenge two: who is actually in charge
A volunteer executive board, and articles that did not readily say who could act.
Volunteer-governed organisations sit outside the ordinary company model, and this one carried the full consequence of that. The executive board were volunteers who had joined to serve the organisation and its purpose, not to run an employer through a restructure. Engagement across that board was uneven: some members were closely involved, others were effectively absent, and neither position was unreasonable given what they had signed up for.
That created a problem with no obvious owner. A fair process needs someone who can chair it, someone who can hear an appeal independently, and someone who can make a final decision that will actually hold. In this organisation, none of those roles were clearly assigned to anybody.
So I went to the source. I worked through the articles of association to establish, in writing and in advance:
Who could chair the process
Which office holder, if any, had standing to chair a consultation, and what happened if that person was conflicted or unavailable.
What constituted a quorum
The minimum board attendance for a valid decision, so no decision taken during the process could later be argued away as improperly made.
How voting actually worked
Voting thresholds, casting votes and the point at which a matter had genuinely been carried rather than merely discussed.
Where escalation and appeal sat
A route of appeal that was genuinely independent of the person who made the original decision, which is a basic fairness requirement and was not obvious from the documents.
Who held final decision making authority
The single clearest question, and the hardest to answer. Named and agreed before consultation opened, so nobody discovered mid process that the decision maker could not decide.
Doing this first is not administrative tidiness. An organisation with vague documentation and no clear decision making authority cannot run a process that is fair or that will withstand scrutiny. Employees deserve to know who is deciding their future and on what basis. Volunteer board members deserve to know exactly what they are being asked to decide and under what authority. Establishing that clarity protected everyone in the room.
Running a fair process
Commonality is what fairness actually looks like in practice.
With one point of truth and a clear line of authority established, consultation could be designed properly. The organising principle was commonality: every affected employee met the same process, in the same way, with the same information, at the same time.
That meant a consistent script and consistent written materials at every consultation meeting, so nobody's understanding depended on which manager they happened to speak to. It meant the same selection criteria applied and evidenced identically across everyone in scope. It meant the same opportunity to be accompanied, the same opportunity to ask questions and propose alternatives, and a genuine commitment to consider what people raised rather than confirming a decision already made. It meant a properly independent appeal route, established in advance rather than improvised when someone asked for one.
Consistency of this kind is often read as a legal safeguard, and it is one. But its real value is human. In a process where people have very little control, knowing that everyone is being treated the same way is one of the few sources of dignity available. People can accept an outcome they did not want. What they cannot accept, and should not have to, is the suspicion that it was handled differently for someone else.
Outplacement: the part that matters most
A redundancy process ends on a date. A person's situation does not.
Alongside the formal process, I provided outplacement support to the employees leaving the organisation. This is the part of the work I care most about, because it is where a difficult process either treats people as a line in a plan or as people.
Outplacement here was not a leaflet and a link to a job board. It was individual, practical, one to one support:
What that meant in practice
Time to absorb it first. Nobody is ready to write a CV on the day they learn their role is at risk. The first conversation is usually not about job hunting at all. It is about listening, and about being a person who is not part of the organisation deciding their future.
CV and profile work. Rebuilding a CV from scratch with people who, in many cases, had not needed one for a decade or more, and getting their LinkedIn profile into a state where employers could actually find them.
Understanding what they are worth. Translating a long tenure in one organisation into skills and evidence the wider market recognises, and being honest about the market they were entering, including salary reality and where their experience carried most value.
Search strategy and interview preparation. Where to look, how to target rather than scattergun, and practising interviews with someone who has sat on the hiring side, so the first interview after years out of the market is not the one that counts.
Confidence. The quiet one, and the most important. Redundancy is not a judgement on ability, but it is very often experienced as one. A significant part of this work is helping people separate what happened to their role from what they are actually capable of.
Employers sometimes treat outplacement as a courtesy at the end of a process. I would argue the opposite. It is the clearest statement an organisation can make about what it thinks of the people who worked for it, and the people who remain are watching how their departing colleagues are treated.
What was left behind
The restructure ended. The governance problems did not have to.
The organisation completed a process it could stand behind, on facts it could evidence, with decisions taken by people who clearly held the authority to take them. Every employee affected went through the same process and received the same information.
What remained afterwards was arguably worth as much: a reconciled position on employment terms, a governance map setting out chair, quorum, voting and decision making authority in plain language, and a board that understood what it was actually responsible for as an employer. The next time that organisation needs to make a difficult decision, it will not be starting by working out who is allowed to make it.
The restructure was the visible part. The real work was establishing what was true and who could decide, because without those two things you cannot run a process that is fair to anybody. And a fair process is not a legal box to tick. It is the difference between someone leaving with their dignity intact and someone leaving feeling they were never really heard. That is why the outplacement support mattered as much to me as the consultation did.
This case study is anonymised. The client, sector and individuals involved are not identified, and no detail is included that could identify any employee affected by the process. It is published to illustrate the approach taken, not the circumstances of any individual.