The Options Are Always Wider Than the Ones You're Handed

Most closures run on a fixed menu. Severance, a reference, some outplacement support, and that's where it stops. Understandable, given how many closures a large organisation might be managing at once and how tight the timelines usually are. But it means the options on offer are rarely the same as the options that actually exist.

A situation that has stayed with me involved a factory closure in Scotland. The HR lead running the closure on the ground did the job the way it should be done. Every worker treated properly, every conversation handled with care, the kind of closure that leaves people able to speak well of the company afterwards even while they're losing their jobs.

She also had family in Canada. Somewhere in the middle of managing everyone else's transition, she asked a question that wasn't on any closure playbook. Was there a role for her at the company's site there.

There wasn't, not as a vacancy sitting open and ready. Nobody had planned for an HR lead in Scotland to relocate to a factory on another continent. It took working out whether the role could exist, what it would involve, whether it made sense for the business as well as for her. None of that was obvious, and none of it was guaranteed to land on yes.

It did. She moved, and built a new chapter in a new country out of a situation that, for almost everyone else involved, only took something away.

The point isn't that this was a nice thing that happened once. The point is what it reveals about how narrowly most organisations define their options when someone's role disappears. The standard closure package answers the question of what a company is obligated to offer. It rarely answers the question of what it could offer if it looked properly.

Redeployment across a border. A different role built around what someone can do rather than the one they happened to be doing. These possibilities exist inside most organisations far more often than HR teams assume. They don't get offered because working them out takes effort nobody is required to spend. The easier path is to stick to the menu and call it fair, and often it is fair. It's just not always the whole answer.

What made the difference here wasn't generosity. It was two things happening at once. Someone was willing to ask for something that wasn't on offer, and someone else was willing to find out whether yes was possible before assuming it was no.

Most people facing a closure or a redundancy never get that far, on either side. The person leaving assumes the standard package is the full extent of what's negotiable. The organisation assumes its obligation ends where the policy does. Both assumptions are usually wrong, or at least incomplete.

What's still on the table in your organisation that nobody's actually checked?