Kevin is a slippery customer, he’ll wriggle free if you allow him. You need to nail him down.

If Kevin is selected for redundancy he’ll find any flaws in your redundancy work whilst turning a blind eye to his own lamentable work performance.

It is essential that a redundancy exercise that selects Kevin is so well defined, calibrated and honed that Kevin has no wriggle room.

Avoid the common mistakes.

One of the most common mistakes is not putting a reference period over which the pool is scored and not defining the measurable period. Kevin will be over this like a rash, seizing on the sloppy back pass to score a goal that saves him.

Always have a reference period over which the pool and the sriteria are scored. Always.

Express the reference period as follows:

All criteria will be scored over the following period from 1 July 2020 until 30 June 2021 (or whatever the relevant date is.)

Then consider the scoring of a employee who has not been employed for the whole reference period, because Kevin is bound to ask and won’t be impressed by an illogical answer or a mind that has not addressed the problem.

Usually the best way of scoring a person who has not been employed for the whole reference period is to adjust the scores to make allowance for that, if possible.

Therefore if the employee with 6 months service during the relevant reference period has had two days of absence in 6 months, then that may need to be doubled to 4 days of absence in 12 months to ensure the playing field is as level as it can be.

Kevin will be on to any perceived unfairness, Kevin will latch on to a short service employee being retained using the selection criteria whilst a longer serving employee has been selected.