Can this change take place?

[DanB]

Morning

I have an employee who has been with us for 8 years. She is currently supervising a direct report in India, however is not effectively managing either herself as a supervisor or as a supervisor of this employee in india. She does have a dislike to outsourcing. Add to this her inability to cope with the high stress level of her role. Even though we have removed some of her duties there is still no sign of improvement. She is the only one in the department in Australia, however works external to an additional team. We do not want to remove her from employment.

Her manager and I however, are wanting to remove her from the supervisory role, and merge herself with the managers other external team and share the role cross training the other team, whilst at the same time lowering her salary to be equal to other team members as there is no longer a supervisory position available.

As such, the plan would be:
a) Advertise a new position within the managers other external team;
b) The Employee applies and is successful, accepts the role at lessor pay as that is what the role is paying;
c) Advertise for a replacement for the employees old role:
d) No one responds to the employees old role (its known that the role is not favoured anywhere within the organization)
e) Seeing as no one has applied for the old position, the department will change direction merging her old role into the department where she will continue to perform the role along with her new duties.

To me this is a little deceptive, however what are the implications of this (if any)?? Effectively she has resigned from her other role however due to the nature of the change, she will need to continue with others in the external team to perform the role.

Hoping this makes sense... Any assistance is appreciated.

[Qld IR Consultant]

Dan, you will open yourself up to adverse action claim I would think. You would be better off implementing performance management whilst "restructuring" and offering the lower role as a redeployment. If the employee does not accept then redundancy kicks in. Make sure you have a robust and transparent process though because there is nothing stopping the employee making a claim even after accepting the new position or the redundancy.....

[Greg Schmidt]

Dan,

You've developed a cunning plan, but it could easily fall over. What makes you think that your employee will actually apply for demotion to a lower-paid job? How confident are you that "No one responds to the employees old role" ? (The lure of a better-paid position can bring people out of the woodwork.)

I agree with Qld IR. If you need to restructure the teams to achieve a workable arrangement, then restructure. If you need to manage the employee's performance, then do that too.