Sylvie Thrush Marsh

There's been a lot going wrong for quite a long time now, kind of going back to COVID times.

And so many businesses have been able to hold on through a couple of those challenges.

We had a couple of recessions a few years ago.

But we're kind of coming to the crunch point where a lot of these employers just don't have any gas left in the tank to hold on.

Yeah, it's a combination of those things.

restructuring can result in redundancies where people are losing their jobs.

But at the moment, a lot of the feedback we're getting from small employers is that they're actually looking to reduce costs and kind of hunker down as much as they can.

So that might look like dropping a shift over the course of the week,

It might look like cutting hours rather than trying to cut jobs.

And actually, about a month ago, we had a small employer who is a cafe owner who proposed to reduce her front of house staff from six employees to five employees.

But her team came back and said, well, what if we all cut our hours a little bit?

Does that mean we can avoid anyone?

having to lose their job.

And she went ahead with that proposal.

So we're seeing employers definitely trying to be creative in the ways that they're reducing costs.

They aren't reaching for the lever to try and make their staff redundant as a first port of call.