Severance Automation: Invest in Peace of Mind
Workforce reductions don’t have to be as agonizing as they sound. The emotional burden will always be significant, but by embracing severance automation, you can make your reduction smart, fast, and compliant.
Let’s take a look at a few of the perks of Onwards HR’s Severance Automation capabilities—helping companies go from “wake me up when this is over” to “that wasn’t so bad.“
Spend Less Time
When it’s time to cut costs and, in turn, employees, it’s important to efficiently calculate severance, generate severance packages, and manage other offboarding tasks. Not only does this save time—it also saves money by reducing time spent on administrative tasks.
Most Human Resource information systems (HRIS) have limited functionality when it comes to severance automation, meaning the bulk of the work still falls to your HR team. Rather than watching HR flounder in a sea of spreadsheets and emails, automation can allow your HR professionals to focus on the employee exit experience.
Mitigate Legal Risk
Workforce reductions require employers to be at the peak of their compliance game. Our technology’s robust data features help companies analyze past, current, and upcoming severance events for compliance with the WARN Act, Mini-WARNs, ADEA, ADA, and Title VII. More importantly, the technology maintains a thorough audit trail, which is helpful in the event that the Department of Labor (DOL) or Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) want to chat.
By using compliance assessment tools to emphasize consistency and objectivity, employers can mitigate wrongful termination and discrimination claims, as well as other unintended consequences that can negatively impact your organization. After layoff criteria have been established, it’s important to review the list of potentially impacted employees. This data can be analyzed to determine if a protected class is disproportionately affected.
Layoffs can be stressful, emotional, and difficult to navigate, but there’s peace of mind in knowing your organization took the necessary steps to ensure compliance—with a supporting audit trail to prove it. There’s also peace of budget knowing that severance automation is a lower-cost option than some legal alternatives.
Create Brand Ambassadors
Reducing headcount is always difficult, but circumstances sometimes make layoffs unavoidable. If employees feel heard and appreciated, you can end a less-than-desirable situation on a positive note. The better the employee experience, the better for your brand, which can affect many layers of people, from customers to current and potential employees.
Despite the circumstances, if you can create a smooth and positive exit experience, former employees will be more likely to recommend your organization—and less likely to lash out on sites like Glassdoor, a move that can impact your company long-term. A smooth employee exit experience is also helpful in today’s world of boomerang hires. For example, if employees can easily access the information they need as they transition out of the workplace, they’ll be less frustrated overall.
By automating as much of the process as possible, HR will have more time to focus on the “people part”—an aspect that can create a favorable last impression.
Achieve Consistency and Flexibility
When it comes to severance policies, consistency with corporate policies is key. By using a severance automation platform, employers can eliminate the internal learning curve while also reducing the risk of human error that’s inherent in manual processes. Onwards HR’s Severance Automation technology has its own set of checks and balances that streamlines the process while ensuring that employees were treated uniformly.
Also, since economic conditions are constantly changing, automation can provide your company with a level of agility that’s difficult to achieve if the process is manual. You can refine severance policies and separation and release agreements as needed, making it easier to adjust to the evolving landscape. For example, one Onwards HR client increased its minimum severance pay to help its employees navigate the complexities of COVID-19. Because the process was configurable and the tool automated calculations, this change was easy to implement across the organization—and, of course, the employees welcomed the pay adjustment.
By embracing technology, you can ensure that your employees have the best possible exit experience, regardless of circumstance, and your company will also be ready to adapt at a moment’s notice.
