Retaining Key Employees When Closing a Facility
Webmaster August 5th, 2007
When deciding to close a facility, what are ways to ensure that key personnel remain with a company to the end of its transition. What tools would be suggested to ensure that a company have their servces for the complete time period?
For most employee’s, the instinct from hearing about the closure will be to immediately begin seeking other employment. If they wait until the actual closure to start looking, they could, depending on the local market for their skill sets, find themselves without an income. By the way, this only works if a company announces that they will be closing at some future date. If you were with a company that decided to close its doors right away, then that will create a negative image amongst the employees as well as customers. A typical severance package is one week of pay for each year of service; some may have a specific upper limit (say, 12 or 15 weeks). For example, if you were with a company for five years, then severence pay would be five weeks. If you were with the company for twenty five years, then it would be twenty five weeks of severance pay. Have your key employees been with the organization long enough for such a package to be worth staying for? What do you plan to offer to other staff who are still with you when the facility is closed? You could also offer something like an additional month’s pay. Also outplacement assistance (interviewing skills, drawing up sums, etc). Do you plan to offer your employees outplacement services? It is considered goodwill for a company to assist the departing employees with finding other employment.
Before you do that you should give some thought to how you define “key” employee, and whether there are any demographic differences between “key” and “non-key” employees. Last thing you need is “so-and-so is getting x because he’s such-and-so, and I’m only getting y because I’m not such-and-so.” Also you should have some written agreement that in exchange for x we are giving you y. This agreement should be reviewed by an attorney with expertise in your state/locality.
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