Business Agility

Plans that assume the bottom half of this table moves at the speed of the top half are the usual source of a restructure that is announced and then quietly delayed by two quarters.

Most workforce agility is created before it is needed, in how roles and terms are set up.

• Write role scope broadly enough to allow redeployment within it, so moving someone to different work is not a variation of contract.
• Keep a genuine mix of engagement types matched to the nature of the work: permanent for core continuing work, fixed term for time-bound projects, and vendor arrangements where the work is peripheral and fluctuating.
• Build skills across the workforce deliberately. Redeployment is only available if people can do more than one thing, and that is a training decision made a year earlier.
• Keep variable pay genuinely variable rather than a fixed component with a variable label, so cost can move with performance without a change to terms.
• Locate work where it can grow or contract without an establishment change, since opening and closing establishments carries its own process.
• Keep records that make a fast decision possible: seniority lists, service dates, engagement types and skills. A restructure conducted from incomplete records is slow regardless of the plan.

• Retrenchment carries notice and compensation, an ordinary order in which workers in a category are retrenched, and a requirement of prior permission for establishments above a prescribed threshold. It is a process with a timetable, not a decision.
• A change in conditions of service in respect of specified matters requires notice before it takes effect, which puts a statutory floor under how quickly terms can move.
• Fixed term employment is available for genuinely time-bound work, on terms not less favourable than comparable permanent employees, with gratuity accruing pro rata. Repeated renewal for continuing work invites the arrangement being treated as permanent.
• Lay-off applies only in specified circumstances and carries compensation; it is not a general power to stop work when demand falls.
• Transfer of an undertaking has its own conditions for continuity, without which transferring workers may be entitled to notice and compensation.
• Closure has its own notice, compensation and, above thresholds, permission requirements.

Verify the retrenchment procedure and thresholds, the notice of change requirements, the fixed term conditions and the lay-off and closure provisions under the Industrial Relations Code, 2020, and the gratuity position under the Code on Social Security, 2020, before committing to any timetable.

• Voluntary attrition rises after each reorganisation, and it is selective. The people who leave first are the ones with alternatives, which is the group the new structure depended on.
• Goals set against a plan that changes twice a year stop being taken seriously, and the appraisal becomes a discussion about which version applied.
• Institutional knowledge disperses. Each restructure breaks relationships and reporting lines that carried undocumented context.
• Managers stop investing in development, because they expect their team composition to change again.
• Records degrade. Reporting lines, cost centres and service dates are the first casualties of a fast reorganisation, and they are what a later gratuity or notice calculation depends on.
• Announcement fatigue sets in, and the next change, including a necessary one, is received as noise.

The practical conclusion is that agility is worth building into structure and skills, where it is cheap, rather than being purchased repeatedly through reorganisation, where it is expensive and where the price is paid by the people you least want to lose.