“Happy to meet, sorry to part, happy to meet again – Bon Accord!”. Aberdeen’s official toast is more than an excuse to stretch your legs during a civic dinner. Skills shortages will come back round, but retaining teams without the right work for them atrophies skills and erodes shareholder value. Offshore Europe 2015 is taking “inspiring the next generation” as its theme, but that’s not the only strategy for managing the next skills shortage.
It’s not just universities that have alumni associations. Former colleagues are an often underutilised network and talent pool. At its worst, goodwill can permanently evaporate if redundancies aren’t handled with at least the same dignity as the original recruitment. We lawyers see the good, the bad and the ugly practices. Overstretched HR teams in particular (with no ill will but perhaps anxious for their own jobs) can turn a disappointed but understanding employee into a critic who denigrates their former employer for the rest of their career.
Sorry to part? My employment law partner, Stuart Robertson, detects a current trend towards reducing or eliminating any enhancement to statutory minimum redundancy payments. For many businesses (but not all) that can be entirely justifiable. In any event mutual respect is, if not priceless, at least not a tradable commodity. It’s not all about the money. Taking time to acknowledge regret is part of putting the “human” into human resource management.
Happy to meet again? Whilst no employer is perfect, over the years my own firm has benefited from a number of colleagues returning to us after a stint in-house or with another firm. Having gained new skills and experience, perhaps in a different part of the world, both sides can benefit. My finance director has also been known to mention the saving in recruitment agency fees! At present the Aerospace and Defence industries seem to be in the ascendancy. Could our industry “lend” some talent in those directions, confident our former colleagues will be happy to return to us when demand for oil and gas services increases? It’s always a good time to invest in the next generation, but we also need to invest in our relationships with the current generation too.
Peter Murray is a partner at Scottish law firm Ledingham Chalmers where he specialises in UK corporate law and international projects.
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