u/Froteaxar

I have been informed that I will be dismissed shortly*. My employer has said it is not because of capability, conduct, or illegality. They claim it’s due to a business restructure. My employer has under 20 staff, no formal HR, and managers have had no formal management training but do get external HR/legal advice occasionally.

Currently, I am one of 6 people working part time in a specific role but going forward it’s been decided that our work will be reallocated to 2-3 full time employees, some also in more hybrid roles (combining multiple job titles). Four part time employees have resigned recently due to personal reasons, myself and one other are being dismissed.

I have worked for this employer for approximately 10 years and would therefore be quite keen to ensure the dismissal is characterised as a redundancy rather than SOSR.

How can I ensure that this occurs?

The only reason I found out about my upcoming dismissal is because I proactively requested a meeting with my line-manager.

In this meeting I informed her that I did not intend to resign and would like to stay with the company. I offered flexibility as to my hours and working patterns. The manager did not engage with this beyond suggesting I get ready to seek alternative employment and offered a strong reference. However, she also stated she would consider my request. A couple days later she informed me that due to the restructure I would not have my contract renewed beyond my current end date of mid-July.

Separately staff were informed via a business-wide email from a different manager that one of the new full time positions was open for recruitment and that current employees could apply but that they would be competing with external candidates. I have chosen not to apply due to the shift pattern being radically different to my current pattern.

Beyond the meeting I organised and the business-wide email, I have not been formally consulted, asked my views, or been allowed to consider or propose alternatives to dismissal by my employer.

One potentially salient factor is that currently I am one of three employees who performs a specific function for the business - for sake of anonymity let’s say it’s document review. In future only one employee will have this document review component to their job.

I suspect that if a fair process were followed the employer may be able to justify my dismissal given the restructure changing their staffing needs. However so far I don’t feel fairly treated, feel quite hurt by the abrupt dismissal, and feel like I should be entitled to a redundancy payment which has not been offered.

Is anyone able to advise on next steps? For example, would filing a grievance now be advisable, and what is the best way to challenge the SOSR framing if the employer takes that route?

*via non-renewal of a FTC with 2+ years service