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Restructuring: Career Transition and Outplacement Makes a Difference

Through a dramatic downsizing, Toombs transformed the lives of those impacted, supported remaining employees and helped improve morale.

When an Alberta-based financial company faced the largest restructuring in their company’s history, they turned to Toombs for support to dramatically downsize their workforce. Toombs led a complex employee reduction program that shifted the organization’s workforce across multiple remote locations throughout Alberta.

AT A GLANCE

  • 85 Notifications
  • 3 Locations

The Situation

Toombs’ role was to address change at the financial company and ensure employees felt supported—whether they were leaving or continuing with the company. Since the notifications would take place across multiple locations, some in remote areas, they needed our support to help steady the ship within and offer outplacement support for those leaving.  The HR team and managers required thorough coaching support to prepare for the downsizing. Toombs was on-hand every step of the process.

Our Approach

Our outplacement team worked closely with the financial company’s HR team during the planning and coordination process of this significant termination. We provided unlimited support including training and regular touch points to the HR and management teams leading up to employee notifications. The support to the HR team included training on releases, stress management and change management. We also helped with notification scripting to ensure a high-quality, respectful, and consistent approach was taken throughout the process.

To reduce the impact on the remaining workforce, we collaborated with the HR team to:

The Results

The detailed planning and communication strategy paid off. The layoffs went smoothly, the HR team felt they were well guided and stress was reduced. Meanwhile the remaining employees were given the time and attention they deserved through the process. Questions were answered at the town hall, they weren’t caught off guard by the announcements, and 1:1 sessions were available to help with anyone experiencing survivor symptoms. This important piece of the strategy meant the company did not also have to battle low morale and disengagement following the layoffs.

Immediately after the layoffs, all career transition follow-up meetings were scheduled to ensure each affected employee was assigned their own Toombs career coach to start supporting them. Our detailed program is a combination of highly personalized 1:1 coaching along with online training. It allowed these individuals to explore their passions, hone their job search skills and get back in the workforce.

Impact on Employees

Sally* was a long-standing employee of the financial company. She was also a single parent under significant pressure to find a new job as soon as possible. Sally struggled with pessimism and a lack of confidence. She had also not looked for work in almost a decade so felt lost as to where to begin online. We accelerated our work with her to both reduce her stress by reconnecting her to her successful career history, help create high impact marketing materials, and collaborated on a work search strategy which optimized her likelihood of success. After five weeks of coaching with Toombs, Sally was successfully employed.

Robert* was a fairly new employee to the financial company and expressed a wish to explore other types of work that could be more interesting and challenging for him. Robert expressed an interest in going back to university but was uncertain whether his high school grades would be sufficient. His Toombs coach helped Robert build work search skills as well as supporting his career transition efforts. Robert successfully enrolled in a technical program at SAIT after completing his program with Toombs.

* We take our clients’ confidentiality seriously. While we’ve changed their names, the results are real.

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