HR Carnival 7 January 2009

 

   The New Year's first carnival is up at Gautam Ghosh's White Spaces.

My favourite post is Rick's from Flip Chart Fairy Tales, rated for its topicality and importance.

Rick asks whether HR professionals are ready for the recession and quotes the CIPD's prediction that 600,000 jobs will be lost next year and that the redundancies will continue into 2010.  In fact, they think this year will be so difficult, they suggest HR will seem more like ER (hospital emergency room rather than employee relations I think)!

However, according to Management Today, the CIPD is still advising companies to avoid redundancies, and to  'hold their nerve':

"The organisation (the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development to those not in the know) says an average redundancy costs employers £16,375 before any savings are made, and that it's much better to hold on to employees and plan for recovery. Its chief economist John Philpott points out that redundancies come with a number of direct or hidden costs, especially when hasty firings ‘have to be quickly reversed by renewed hiring when economic conditions improve'. The CIPD's advice: companies should ‘hold their nerve'."

My experience at the moment suggests companies are doing just that.  I was talking to one of my clients earlier today who said their main focus was on planning for the eventual upturn - and I'm noticing lots of other organisations doing this too.  I hope it continues - with this degree of optimism, we may yet be able to talk ourselves out of a recession as deep as the CIPD fears.

(By the way, the photo used in this post is of a pile of rubbish at the end of the Notting Hill Carnival in the UK - I thought it was a suitable metaphor for the current state of our economy!)

Technorati Tags: CIPD,John Philpott,recession,redundancy,costs

 

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