In yesterday’s post we saw that the law requires an employer to think about the issue of pool and provided the pool is reasonable the Employment Tribunal will not interfere. Jobs should be pooled by interchangeability.

 

In today’s post we will look at geographically dispersed employees all performing the same role.  Let’s use service engineers as an example.

 

National pools do not work, despite interchangeability of job role. If you use a national pool then an employer runs the risk of the service engineers selected all being from one region or geographic area leaving the business short of cover. A service engineer based and covering Cornwall would not want to also cover South Wales or be able to do so efficiently.

Better to pool using the same geographic regions that the service enginners cover: For example:

 

Region:

Present Number of Service Engineers

Future Number of Service Engineers

Surplus

North Scotland

1

0

1

Central Scotland

2

2

0

Southern Scotland and Borders

1

0

1

North West England

4

4

0

North East England

4

4

0

Yorkshire and Humberside

4

4

0

Lincolnshire

1

0

1

East Midlands

3

3

0

West Midlands

4

4

0

East Anglia and Essex

3

3

0

North Wales

1

0

1

South Wales

2

2

0

Bristol and West

3

3

0

Devon and Cornwall

1

0

1

South Coast West and South West

2

2

0

South Coast and South East

3

3

0

London

5

5

0

Southern Home Counties

3

3

0

Northern Home Counties

4

4

0

 

This method would be well understood by the service engineers. It would also mean that the redundancies lie where they fall. If Southern Scotland and the Borders has seen a decline in customers meaning there was no need for a service engineer to cover that region, the redundancy falls there.

The alternative method would be to almagamate some regions, for example the South West and Wales. However this would mean the service engineers who survived the selction process would have bigger areas to cover and have more travel. That may well be inefficient.

 

Tomorrow my final post on pooling – who gets to keep their personal assistant and who gets to share one.