HR set to work more than 20 overtime days in 2020

A new research from Randstad Risesmart UK has revealed that HR professionals are set for 22 days’ worth of overtime in the second half of 2020 as redundancy figures increase and workloads skyrocket amid the coronavirus crisis.

In September, data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) found that almost 700,000 workers had fallen from company payrolls between March and August this year – which was largely due to the financial impact that the pandemic had had on businesses.

With the UK Government’s Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme (CJRS) set to close at the end of October – which was unveiled earlier this year by Chancellor Rishi Sunak to prevent wide-scale unemployment – experts have warned that many more jobs could be made redundant.

According to Randstad Risesmart UK’s poll of 85 people practitioners working for organizations that employ circa 50,000 people in total, every ‘vanilla’ redundancy – simple and standard redundancies that run with no complications – typically costs HR leaders seven and a quarter hours of work.

Yet, the research also shed light on the increasing number of redundancies that don’t run smoothly, because they have gone to tribunal for example.

The study found that the number of ‘non-vanilla’ redundancies – redundancies that may have some complications – now equates to 28% of the total number of redundancies, which represents a staggering 140 hours of work for the HR function.

This dovetails with separate research from the UK Government which found that the number of employment tribunals involving individuals increased by almost 20 percent between April and June 2020.

Employment law firm Irwin Mitchell suggested that the number of cases is likely to increase in the next year.

In addition to this, Randstad’s study found that a quarter of HR professionals said that the percentage of redundancies that aren’t simple processes is on the rise.