In our first article on reskilling, we mentioned the impact Covid lockdowns have had on organizations, including hiring freezes and organizational restructures as attempts to cut costs.
While employees may not have felt the initial impact of hiring freezes, the mere thought of your company undergoing a restructure is quite terrifying as you question whether or not you’ll still have a job.
But what exactly is restructuring? Restructuring occurs when an employer changes the nature and functions of an employee’s position. This often necessitates updating the job description to reflect new responsibilities and outcomes.
This can include horizontal restructuring – when a worker’s current job requirements are modified to include some new tasks performed in other jobs on the same level – or vertical restructuring – when a position is given responsibilities and tasks previously performed at higher levels.
So even if you do retain your position, it’s quite likely that your role will change, and your responsibilities expand. Fear of the new, unknown, or different, is often a source of great stress for employees at work, and for people in general, regardless of how smart and sensible they are.
It is so common that The Guardian has listed the top five most common reasons that people feel stressed during a period of change at work.
Note: If you’re looking for dedicated restructuring tools, there are solutions specifically designed for managing organizational restructures. However, if you want to build long-term workforce agility that makes future organizational changes smoother, Fuel50’s talent marketplace capabilities can help create that foundation. Request a demo now.
What is job restructuring?
Job restructuring is a strategic process where an employer modifies an employee’s job by either removing or adding responsibilities or altering the job’s essential functions. This can be done for various reasons, such as accommodating an employee with a disability, enhancing company efficiency, or adapting to market changes.
Here are some examples of job restructuring:
- Modifying a job: Removing tasks that are no longer necessary to streamline operations.
- Adding new tasks: Introducing new responsibilities to make a job more challenging and engaging.
- Changing essential functions: Adjusting the core duties of a job to better align with the company’s goals and objectives.
- Providing reasonable accommodations: Making adjustments to enable employees with disabilities to perform the essential functions of their job.
This helps companies create a more dynamic and adaptable workforce, ensuring that employees are well-equipped to meet evolving business needs.
What are the reasons for job restructuring?
One of the primary reasons for job restructuring is company reorganization. This can involve significant changes to the company’s structure, such as downsizing, merging with another company, or outsourcing certain functions.
Job restructuring helps your company adapt to these changes and ensures that your employees can perform their jobs effectively. For instance:
- Eliminating redundant positions: Streamlining operations by removing overlapping roles.
- Creating new positions: Developing roles that are better aligned with the company’s business goals and objectives.
- Providing reasonable accommodations: Adjusting jobs to support employees with disabilities, ensuring they can perform their essential functions.
Through thoughtful job restructuring, businesses can navigate organizational changes more smoothly, maintaining productivity and employee morale.
Top 5 stressors for employees during restructuring
- Fear of personal failure within a new structure: ”It will never work out for me. I won’t be able to do it.”
- Preferring the familiar, old routine: ”The old way was much better, we knew what we were doing before.”
- Denial of the reasons for change: ”Why did we have to do this anyway? I can’t see how this will improve anything.”
- Unwillingness to learn new systems and processes: ”I already know everything I need to know to do my job, nothing new can help me.”
- Fear of the unknown: ”I don’t know what it will be like for any of us, but I know we will all be worse off.”
We can easily see the insecurities employees have around the roles and responsibilities. These insecurities are often due to a lack of communication resulting in people assuming the worst possible scenarios.
Many employees may feel uncertain about their future roles and responsibilities during restructuring. In addition, organizational restructures can result in other problems such as underestimating the time required to identify, adjust, and rewrite job descriptions, the overlap in positions, and uncertainties over responsibilities for particular tasks.
What does a job restructuring process look like?
The job restructuring process involves several critical steps to ensure a smooth transition and positive outcomes for both the company and its employees. Here’s a step-by-step guide:
- Identifying the need for job restructuring: Analyze the company’s business goals and objectives, as well as the job’s essential functions and requirements.
- Determining the scope of the restructuring: Decide which jobs will be affected and what specific changes will be made to each job.
- Developing a restructuring plan: Create a detailed plan that includes timelines, budgets, and the resources required for the restructuring process.
- Implementing the restructuring plan: Communicate the changes to employees, provide necessary training and support, and monitor the progress of the restructuring.
- Evaluating the effectiveness of the restructuring: Assess the impact of the restructuring on the company’s business goals and objectives, as well as on employee satisfaction and engagement.
It’s essential to consider the impact on employees and the company culture throughout the restructuring process.
Ensuring that the process is fair, transparent, and compliant with relevant laws and regulations, such as the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), is crucial for a successful restructuring.
How to manage an effective restructuring process?
Restructures are complex endeavors, but they are necessary for organizational evolution and continued growth. Restructures can help a business reconfigure its strategic alignment, address issues that might prevent employees from doing their best work, and improve employee satisfaction. This is particularly important when integrating a new business following a merger or acquisition.
There is one thing that makes any restructure, or change, go better across all levels of an organization – frequent and concise communication. Many business leaders recommend not only communicating often but “communicate much more than you think is natural”.
The aim is to keep your employees informed of what is happening and to allow them to ask questions. Even if you do not have all the answers, being honest and genuine will go a long way to maintaining your employees’ trust in both you and the organization.
Once the framework for the restructure has been confirmed, ensure that appropriate mentoring, coaching, learning and development programs, etc., are in place. These should be aimed at all levels to ensure people feel supported and receive the support they need to perform well in their new role.
6 tips for communicating during a restructuring process
- Brief the organization early on that there will be a restructure and explain why you are taking this course of action. Once you have established and communicated this narrative, stick to it throughout the process to limit confusion.
- Identify those people leading the restructuring. Ideally, have a change manager leading the process, with support underneath.
- Hold regular check-ins between change managers and team leaders who can then communicate issues from the teams upwards and updates from the change managers downwards.
- Once you have the new structure confirmed, talk your employees through it, explaining the “whys” and the “why nots”. Employees may be offered a new job as an alternative to redundancy and should be informed about their rights and the trial period for the new role. When people propose alternatives, explain why these wouldn’t work, again sticking to the original narrative.
- Communicate any potential disadvantages or challenges and what plans are in place.
- Where roles are disestablished have individual one-to-one meetings with these employees and treat them with dignity and respect. Explain that this is not personal but a business decision. Provide support such as counseling, career guidance, or support for creating a cv or attending interviews.
Undertaking a restructuring is no small feat, but when it is managed well with concrete action plans, frequent clear communications, and sensitivity and humility, you can limit the confusion, tension, and fear that employees may be feeling.
How Fuel50’s features can support organizations through restructuring
While Fuel50 is not specifically a restructuring tool, our talent marketplace platform offers several capabilities that can help organizations navigate restructuring more effectively and compassionately:
Surface hidden skills and capabilities
One of the biggest challenges during restructuring is understanding your workforce’s full capabilities to make informed decisions about role changes.
Fuel50’s expert-driven skills ontology creates a detailed map of skills across your organization, helping you:
- Identify employees with transferable skills who could excel in newly created roles
- Understand skill adjacencies to support lateral moves during reorganization
- Spot skill clusters that could inform new role design
For example, when UCI underwent organizational changes, Fuel50’s skills insights helped them discover “silent skills” within their org chart that weren’t being utilized in employees’ current roles, enabling smarter talent redeployment decisions.
Enable data-driven career transitions
During restructuring, leaders need clear visibility into how to redeploy talent effectively.
Fuel50’s talent marketplace can:
- Match employees to new internal opportunities based on their skills and career aspirations
- Identify development paths for employees transitioning to modified roles
- Surface mentoring relationships to support employees through role changes
KeyBank leveraged these capabilities during their workforce transformation, helping employees discover new internal career paths they hadn’t previously considered.
Support change management through transparency
Restructuring creates uncertainty for employees. Fuel50’s career pathing tools help reduce anxiety by:
- Providing clear visibility into potential career moves within the new structure
- Highlighting development actions needed to succeed in modified roles
- Empowering employees to explore different internal opportunities proactively
As CarTrawler’s Director of Talent noted during their reorganization: “We want anyone who joins CarTrawler to really feel like they’ve had the opportunity to thrive, to flourish, and to grow during their journey with us.”
Preserve institutional knowledge
Restructuring risks losing valuable organizational knowledge.
Fuel50’s platform helps by:
- Facilitating mentoring connections to transfer critical knowledge
- Documenting skills and capabilities across the workforce
- Creating visibility into expertise that should be retained and developed
This capability proved particularly valuable for organizations like Relayr, who used Fuel50 to retain key talent and expertise during periods of change.
Note: If you’re looking for dedicated restructuring tools, there are solutions specifically designed for managing organizational restructures. However, if you want to build long-term workforce agility that makes future organizational changes smoother, Fuel50’s talent marketplace capabilities can help create that foundation. Request a demo now.
1. Chron, Neil Kokemuller. https://work.chron.com/job-restructuring-17903.html. Accessed unknown.
2. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/careers/cope-stress-survival-guide-restructuring-redundancy-change-work. Accessed unknown.
3. Harvard Business Review, Stephen Heidari-Robinson and Suzanne Heywood. https://hbr.org/2016/10/the-two-biggest-communication-blunders-during-a-reorg. Accessed 20 October 2016.
