Sonic Career Series. Surviving COVID Chapter 3: Avoiding redundancy

Welcome to chapter 3 of the Surviving COVID series: Avoiding redundancy.

Redundancy is something that many of you’ll be thinking about right now with the UK approaching 200,000 COVID redundancies. Whilst you can’t always avoid redundancy, there are things you can do to prevent its likelihood.

First of all, redundancies aren’t chosen at random. Employers have a duty to assess their employees for redundancy fairly against a set of criteria.

Some of the criteria your employer may consider are:

👉 Skills / experience

👉 Attendance and disciplinaries 

👉 Performance

Taking this into consideration, let’s look at how you can protect your job.

📌 Don’t be on time, be early – this is one of the most basic responsibilities that you need to be getting right

📌 Go the extra mile – be the employee that can be relied upon to do work to a fantastic standard, even if it stretches past your basic responsibilities

📌 Help your team – look for opportunities to proactively offer help to your colleagues so long as it doesn’t interfere with your workload

📌 Actively participate – truly become part of your company by participating in meetings, contributing ideas, and attending social events

📌 Be a mood lifter – employers are sometimes more inclined to keep employees that have a positive influence on the team’s morale

📌 Cross-sell yourself – speak to your manager about your transferable skills and any additional ways you could be adding value

If you feel you’re at risk of redundancy, you can minimise the damage by starting to apply for jobs now, and by getting your finances in check (see Surviving COVID: chapters 1 and 2).

I’ll see you all in chapter 4, which is all about how to upskill yourself.

Bye for now,

Julie 💜