How not to exit a staff member

How not to exit a staff member

This is a story of how an organisation attempted, through various means, to exit a staff member and the many mistakes they made along the way. There are important lessons in it for any employer. The biggest lesson the story illustrates is the need to engage specialist employment legal advice and to do it early.

Vario does not provide employment legal advice and nothing in the story should be interpreted as legal advice. We do assist organisations through change processes and we are experienced in engaging appropriate advice from specialists in this area of law.

A story of when change goes wrong Part I: Too much, too fast

A story of when change goes wrong Part I: Too much, too fast

The governing Council of Unitec Institute of Technology has recently been dissolved and a Commissioner has been appointed by the Minister of Education to run the organisation. This is the public sector equivalent of going into receivership. Unitec recently sold land to the Crown for housing developments for $134m. Even that cash injection was not enough to stave off disaster. That paid off (or down) debt, but they also lost $55m over the last two years, with another $45m of projected losses over the next two.

So, what went wrong? Well, as is so often the case, Unitec's financial woes are a symptom of their problems, not the root cause. They made mistakes, no doubt. But this series is less about recriminations made from an armchair than an attempt to identify lessons from which we all can learn.