Redundancy process refinement required

For genuine operational requirements David Jones redeployed 19 employees and made another 16 employees redundant.

As part of the process, in determining who would be redeployed, managerial staff used an informal skills and capability assessment and circulated a survey for employees to complete.

The Commissioner said the assessment was an ‘inherently subjective’ process and different managerial staff who give different scores for different people.

The redundancies were found to be genuine redundancies.  However, 1 was found to be unfairly dismissed.

The Fair Work Commission suggested that David Jones improve their redundancy process and that it is far from ideal that passionate, dedicated and long-term employees have been left feeling so disgruntled at the end of the process.