Hello

We’re looking at a team of administrators who undertake a customer service type role. There are some planned technical changes to the way the service is accessed by customers – by that I mean that the internet facilities for customers will be improved.

Although at the moment, the plans are still under discussion, it looks as though there will be changes to the roles in the customer service administration team. They would need to learn new technology related skills and the way they do their day to day job will vary. Although the purpose of their role is the same, and at this stage I’m expecting that their pay, location and working hours etc will remain the same.

Assuming that there is no diminished need for the number of adminiatrators undertaking the role and there is just the requirement for a different skill-set – should we be treating this as a redundancy situation? Or (even if the alterations to the role are reasonably significant) can we legitimatley avoid a redundancy situation and simply treat it as an evolvement of the role and re-skill appropriately?

I realise that the latter option might lead to performance management issues, and it may appear that we’re setting some people up to fail. (Obviously this is not the intention at all – we just looking to further improve the service to customers.)

I hope that some of you may be able to help me out with this one.

Many thanks
Sarah
Sarah Jennings