CEO told staff to just leave if we have concerns and trust issues with leadership - what now?

There’s been a lot of upheaval recently, restructuring, 3 rounds of redundancies in just over 2 years, and very mixed messaging from leadership about the company’s direction. It’s created a lot of insecurity and confusion across the business.

So the company is in trouble.

“I’m afraid if … there is a breakdown of trust, there is no way I can rebuild it and I would ask you openly to please volunteer yourself to leave the business”

So the company is in bigger trouble than can be seen from the outside.

From here, there are 2 choices.

1. You stay and pray - that the sheet will not hit the fan too hard, and not in your direction.
2. You take it AND leave it. I.e., take the advice of the management and leave the company, find another job.

... please volunteer yourself to leave the business ...

This is a cunning trick coming from the manager. If they fire you for being redundant, they still have to compensate you financially to some degree. If you volunteer, you get nothing when leaving.

You can choose this 3^rd option, to wait until you are made redundant (so you can get some financial compensation), but it is risky. If too many people are made redundant at the same time (which is quite possible, as it already happened), you might not find a job to your liking easily.

I genuinely care about my work and my team

That is very nice and professional of you. Now you have to decide (additionally) if you care about yourself and about your future and about your family and their future too.

With this information, you can start doing the thinking, before taking a final decision - which has to be entirely yours. We do not know all the details of your life, to be able to make a better decision than you can make yourself.

Any advice from those familiar with employment law or HR best practice would be really appreciated.

I hypothesize that employment law and HR best practices should not be your main concern, and I will exemplify with a real-life story.

Compare your company with this other company that I know about (they outsourced some work to our company). When this other company ran into troubles, one of the measures was to make people redundant. They did not tell anyone "please volunteer", but they put all the names in the proverbial "hat" - engineers, managers, secretaries - and they picked names from that hat. And they actually fired not only engineers or lowest level managers, but middle level and higher level managers as well. I know because I received their farewell e-mails.

You are focusing on the wrong problem.

Firstly, am I doing the right thing?

Not really. The writing here is on the wall: the company is in serious trouble and management appears to already be operating in panic mode. It's highly likely that the ship is going down, so it's time to plan your exit strategy.

For context I am currently on mat leave so I can’t just go and get another job.

That does complicate matters. You should maybe contact the Citizen Advice or local labor law expert what your rights and responsibilities are in this case and also familiarize yourself your contract and your company's policies. I'm sure there is a way to handle this.

I also genuinely love my job, care about the company mission and the people I work with.

That's great but irrelevant. The likelihood that your job or the company will still be around in a year or two is low. It's easier to find a new job while you are still employed.

Could this (alongside a pattern of poor communication and uncertainty) form part of a constructive dismissal claim if things continue? And practically, should I be contacting ACAS at this stage, or wait to see how HR handle the grievance first?

Neither. None of this will make any difference if the company goes under.

I was planning to handle my concerns informally through HR, but after that comment, I’ve decided to treat it as a formal grievance.

Firstly, am I doing the right thing?

You asked a very good question which resulted in a very informative answer about what kind of CEO is running the company. As for treating this as a formal grievance, because of their answer combined with the working conditions leading up to it have had a negative impact on not just you but also your coworkers, this may be a collective grievance.

As part of this, is your manager on your side and also negatively impacted by everything going on? If so then it may be best to engage in an informal grievance talk with your manager to see if they are willing to do a formal collective grievance on behalf of not just you, but all of your coworkers. This would be much harder to be ignored, and would allow someone else to deal with the process since you are on maternity and thus have more important things to be losing sleep over.

If you do decide to go down the formal grievance process I strongly recommend reading the Acas guide to discipline and grievances at work before starting one.

Also tread carefully. Businesses in these situations are more likely to do something illegal like retaliation. So if you go through with a formal grievance without any support from coworkers or your manager you could be painting a target on your back.

Could this (alongside a pattern of poor communication and uncertainty) form part of a constructive dismissal claim if things continue?

At this time what has been happening does not amount to a constructive dismissal. Here is the definition from the UK gov website:

Constructive dismissal is when you’re forced to leave your job against your will because of your employer’s conduct.

The reasons you leave your job must be serious, for example, they:

• do not pay you or suddenly demote you for no reason
• force you to accept unreasonable changes to how you work - for example, tell you to work night shifts when your contract is only for day work
• let other employees harass or bully you

The comment from the CEO though in bad taste it is not forcing you to leave your job nor making a significant change to your job. If they announced a major change with the work you would be working on when you return from maternity leave, then you would have something worth talking to an employment lawyer about.

As an ex-CEO, let me translate:

• "Please volunteer yourself to leave" is CEO speak for "Layoffs are ongoing". I'd use a non-call-to-action "feel free" otherwise.
• "No way I can rebuild trust" is a sign that the CEO has lost the shareholders' trust as well. I'd use a non-promise like "we'll do our best" otherwise.

On maternity leave, your best strategy is to keep collecting the benefits owed till they run out.

For others, ask your manager face-to-face (never in writing!) if they're making a redundancy list. Drop a non-verbal hint if you'd like to volunteer while keeping your layoff benefits.

If you start stirring up trouble, you will be in the next round of redundancies.

Pretend you trust the leadership. Keep your head down and don't do anything that makes you a target. Unless they are actually doing something to force you (personally) out of the company, you probably don't have any grounds for constructive dismissal. Bad management doesn't really count.

Meanwhile, keep an eye out for any good jobs when you come off maternity leave.

The win-win situation is to be made redundant, collect the redundancy pay, then go to your new job. But that's not easy to achieve.

The same thing happened with a company I worked for. The CEO made demands of the staff and openly told anyone who didn't like the policy that they should find another employer who aligned with their views.

After a while, this blew over when the CEO moved onto other things.

If you enjoy working for the company and the people you work with, then I'd recommend sitting and waiting things out. If changes affect you in a way that's unsustainable for you, then do think about leaving and finding another job.

In my experience, CEOs wielding this sort of ego around sometimes don't survive a board decision to remove them, especially if the upset is causing public concern and ultimately affecting revenue and share prices.

wait things out, see how things go, but in the meantime prepare a plan B for yourself.

Continue to document events as they happen. If there's any emails that seem pertinent, it might be a good idea to print them out and document (since incriminating emails can mysteriously disappear over time).

The CEOs approach here isn't necessarily illegal, just immoral.

You don't say in which industry your company is, but in an IT company we are in a similar situation now, what with the depression, AI and strong focus on offshore. Thankfully there are no layoffs per se, but the situation is very volatile, and prospects are not good. In the UK you have your own bag of political issues right now which probably don't make it easier.

So, what to do. First thing would be to accept the situation. The global and regional economic situation in your and mine countries is dire at the moment. Nobody knows what the future will bring, and few people know how to handle the day to day situation to improve it. This is just the way it is right now, there is nothing you can do about it (if there were, you would not be asking this).

Your CEO (and any other CEO) does not have any more or less information than you, nor power to change it. Probably less than the "working" employees - you can at least try to do your best and make your customers want to come back. The CEO (and C-level overall) has very little concrete instruments to improve the situation, except avoid bankruptcy through measures like layoffs and other cost reductions. They cannot magically wish more customer orders into existence.

Also, not every CEO is a communicative mastermind; in fact I'd say that the position somewhat is biased towards strong-willed "alphas" who often are more in a mindset of "tough love". I mean at least he's not dishonest.

Secondly, I would suggest not to expect anything. Do not expect the situation to improve, but also do not expect it to get worse. This might sound naive, but it reflects the fact that you simply can not predict the future. Whenever someone tells you to expect something fundamental to change in the next quarter or year, ignore it. They cannot know. When they are saying such things they are more expressing their wishes, their gut feelings, or their general (positive or negative) outlook on the world.

This leaves you to stay in the moment. Do the best work you can in whatever role you have, as you would do always, anyways. There is literally nothing else you can do to help your company to exist in the future, and yourself not being part of the next wave of people let go.

Obviously you can and should still prepare personally for any eventualities. Polish your CV; maybe start networking with old friends who are in other companies to shortcut your re-employment process if it should become necessary. If this is a thing over there, and unless you feel that would somehow worsen your prospects in your old company, get an interim report. If you feel like it, start looking for alternative employments even if you are not actively searching for job interviews just yet, so that when the time comes you have everything in place and you get a jump start when looking for a new job. All of this will also give you a little peace of mind and maybe go through this phase with less mental issues.

Speaking of mental: you can start occasionally imagining a future where you are not in the company, and just imagine the process of finding a new company, and working in a new company. When you do that, do it in a relaxed environment, and if you feel panic setting in, stop. Focus on feeling good about it. I know this sounds... abstruse... but you can program your own mind to more acceptance, and if and when it happens you are already used to it and it is not a total crash. Remember: everything will end, no matter what, it's just the way reality is.

And for god sakes do not start raking up overtime or anything like that; stay healthy first and foremost.

I’d like to take an alternative angle. It’s not really a different answer, as the company is clearly going through difficult times so planning for other employment will still be advisable, but I’d like to explore the idea that management – and the CEO in particular – are not villains. Which doesn’t mean that anyone else is.

It sounds like the company are communicating good weeks, bad weeks and very bad weeks. The reason this looks inconsistent is because events are inconsistent. A different approach would be to pass less information – or less frequent information – on to staff, but other employees would resent that approach as too secretive. There is no right answer for everyone.

The company also had a meeting where questions from staff were given a response. I’m not sure how your question to the CEO was phrased, but if it was as in the question above with reference to “the breakdown of trust” (rather than “any breakdown of trust”), the CEO might have believed that this was (or could be) an aggressive question even if that wasn’t your intention. The CEO will also have recognised the phrase “breakdown of trust” from other people who have been reading about constructive dismissal. Again, it’s easy to see how the question could have seemed aggressive, even if that wasn’t the intention.

The CEO could simply have not answered that question. Or publicly objected to it. Instead, he gave what looks to be a frank and forthright answer. Some will say overly frank and forthright, but again, when a company is struggling there are often no right answers. And if an employee feels there has been a breakdown of trust, leaving may be the best answer.

That said, you asked how they were planning to address trust issues. Is there an answer you would have found satisfactory? If so, perhaps you could ask your line manager to communicate your suggestion to their (the line manager’s) supervisors.

It sounds like the company is going through difficult times, but I’m not convinced it’s a case of poor communication and uncertainty – it looks to me like blunt and undisguised communication of the uncertainty the company is facing.

Loyalty is very important. Unfortunately your CEO has just destroyed any reason to be loyal to him or the company.

Since you are on maternity leave, make sure to give the company no reason to try to stop paying what they owe you.

Once your maternity leave is over, you work as much as your salary pays for, and not one minute more. Start looking for a new job, because I suspect the company won’t be paying salaries for too long. When you find something that pays the same or more, you give notice while asking the company if they are fine with less notice.

You may be careful: If you think you will be laid off and will be paid compensation then you do your best to play your cards right.

I'm afraid if … there is a breakdown of trust, there is no way I can rebuild it and I would ask you openly to please volunteer yourself to leave the business

This would enable them to not have to pay you severance. You have to ask yourself if holding out for severance is worth sinking with the ship.

Your call.

Firstly, am I doing the right thing? For context I am currently on maternity leave so I can't just go and get another job. I also genuinely love my job, care about the company mission and the people I work with.

Morality or ethics has no place in the work environment. You may love your job, but the job does not love you. Human beings have morals, abstract legal entities like a business are not capable of moralistic thought.

You should give your employer the same care and consideration in your dealings with them as you would get from them. Which is none.

I'm not trying to cause trouble. I genuinely care about my work and my team, and want to find a way forward that improves trust and communication. But this feels like the company is pushing employees out emotionally before anything official happens.

There probably is no way forward. The writing is on the wall. It says the ship is sinking. The only thing left is a choice for you as to whether you want to drown with the ship or leave before it sinks.

I think the Boss interpreted your question as questioning his trustability, or the trustability of the management controlled by him.

I am sorry, but your question clearly had such a flavor, even if you did not want it. And this boss is now fighting for the survival of the company.

Asking this was not a good idea.

Btw, literally he has right.

I translate his post to direct language English:

If you do not trust us, go away now.

And he has right in what he said. That the company goes badly and he must fire a lot of people, yes that is bad, but not a trustability problem. Your question set it up as if they had been uncredible for re-structuring the company.

Note, "re-structuring" never means that they would hire new people :-)

Although not that is the best to do. I do not know the UK work law very well, but very likely, if you leave on your free will, is not so good for you if you leave because the next layoff.

So,

1. Do not package insults into corporate BS talk, the bosses decode it much better as you could formulate it.
2. Your options are: a) going away now b) looking silently for your next job c) remain. | It is not a trustability decision for you, it is a career decision. Very likely, (a) is the worst option for you, your real decision is between (b) and (c), so do not what the boss said.