During the 20 years of my Digital Advertising career, I have often been challenged to describe what I do. Everyone is aware of the little boxes of annoying imagery that are scattered around a webpage like clickable square confetti, but try explaining how that advertisement for a bank, airline or telecommunications company actually got there. You can probably imagine the glazed looks; you might be glazing over a bit just reading about it now.
Digital Media in general, and the Ad Operations side in particular (which is where I have spent my career), is inherently fragile. New companies fire up and burn out regularly. This is why there are so many weird business names, such as Allegiant Media, Crunchy Social and Naked Communications. There are only so many coherent combinations of words in the English language. There is even a media planning agency called The Media Planning Agency! Go ahead and look them up – I’ll wait.
I haven’t dipped my toe into the shark-infested waters of working in a media agency yet; it’s been solely content publishers and tech vendors for me. However, based on the notorious staff churn, if I join a media agency tomorrow, I will probably have worked for three of them by the end of the year.
How Redundancy in Australia Works
This means I have a fair idea of how redundancy works, at least from the recipient’s perspective. It starts with the manager quietly asking for a meeting when there is a spare moment (sinking feeling), followed by trudging towards a meeting room and conducting a pointless and stilted chat along the way (dread rising), and then sitting opposite each other and the unmarked White Envelop of Destiny slides across the desk (chill down the spine). The coup de grâce is the grand opening and confirmation of redundancy (time to get ye olde resume in order).
No individual is ever made redundant (officially), it is their role that becomes unneeded. Therefore, when someone says they have been made redundant, they are actually referring to their paid work and that their (now former) employer no longer requires that collection of tasks and responsibilities to be conducted. Based on every exit interview I have ever been involved with, no employer ever wanted me to leave (except <cough> SBS <cough>, bastards) but there simply was no longer a job for me to do. Sad.
Fair Work Australia outlines that depending on the cause of the redundancy, the employee could be redeployed elsewhere in the organisation. This would depend on another role being available that fits within the employee’s skillset, and that the company isn’t actually closing down or retreating out of the country. Redeployment has never actually been offered to me; I wonder what that’s like.
My personal history with job redundancies, all five of them so far, covers a selection of the possible causes that are outlined by Employsure. One is where the whole company goes out of business (so everyone’s role is made redundant). In difficult economic times, a company may be forced to reduce its staffing levels to remain in business, leading to making certain non-critical roles redundant. Another common instance is where a multi-national company leaves Australia and retreats into their other established markets, in which case staff go off on their own and have a three-hour lunch followed by watching Spider-Man at Hoyts George Street (true story).
To make a role redundant, according to Ashlee Miller’s article in Mondaq.com, the company needs to demonstrate that the tasks and activities that constitute a person’s job are no longer required. There are certain expectations in law that need to be met based on company size, but a common thread is that the employee has certain protections and that employers have obligations that need to be met before the role can be made redundant. Unlike some countries, Australian law prevents summarily firing someone just because they are unlikeable, somewhat annoying or perhaps just a slightly below-average worker.
1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Redundancies
After narrowly avoiding redundancy at my very first employer out of university (and only because I left a couple of months prior to the whole department being closed down), my role was made redundant for the first time. This was 2002 and my employer, BT Looksmart, was an early indexing platform people could use to find stuff, prior to Google getting their proverbial into gear. The whole Sydney office was closed down and operations moved to the main company location in London. Cue long lunch and Spider-Man.
Most of us saw this redundancy on the horizon, so it wasn’t a surprise when it arrived. Many of us still keep in touch and there is the occasional reunion. At the time, I was confident in my career and perhaps exuded a level of naivety that has certainly evaporated since. Then, it wasn’t such a problem and I took a few weeks off before finding another job. Now, 17 years later, a redundancy is a major problem.
Some may know that Microsoft restructures their global businesses semi-regularly. This results in staff cuts triggering a redundancy orgy that would make HR departments in lesser companies quake with fear. In 2009, Microsoft Advertising had been a sub-element of Microsoft Australia, and doing quite well. A small office of 30 to 40 in Pyrmont worked away happily several suburbs away from the main Microsoft building in North Ryde.
For the individual, namely me in this case, it was a surprise to get the morning request from my manager to have a meeting room chat. Being Microsoft’s way (and not necessarily how things are done in other places I have worked) upon getting the Dreaded Letter of Immediately Paid-Out with No Prior Warning, I had to go straight back to my desk, pack up my things and leave the office immediately. Yep, no eye contact with people I had enjoyed working with for close to 2 years. The best I could manage in response to hushed queries was a shrug and some eyebrow raising.
Outside, and the morning had seemed unnaturally bright, harsh even and surreal. A typical work morning would have me at my desk at this time and oblivious to this 9am-ish Pyrmont. It was a time and place that was actually unfamiliar. A few stragglers were still making their way to work but there I was, my meagre office belongings in my backpack, and I standing outside the office like a lost puppy wondering where home was. I shouldn’t have been there, but unknown others on the other side of the world decided that, on that day, I would be. And I wasn’t to come back either.
ADTECH in 2013 was a multi-national company, primarily based in Germany and the US, with satellite offices in lots of other places, including Australia. I had been the sole employee in Australia for more than five years and was used to weekly 3am conference calls with peers and managers scattered around the world.
This third redundancy was one that I had an inkling was coming. Long story short, AOL had been an ADTECH client for a few years and then decided to buy the company as part of ramping up their collection of advertising technologies. With this position of control, AOL then absorbed the elements of ADTECH that it wanted and discarded the rest, much like a 3-year-old sucks up a strawberry milkshake then throws the cup on the floor. I discovered that I was the unwanted straw in the discarded cup of employment.
Unlike Microsoft Advertising, I worked from home with ADTECH, so I didn’t have to travel far after the news of the redundancy. I was recently married, but the kids hadn’t arrived yet, so there wasn’t any great negative impact. With redundancies, and a few other company changes in between, I had collected a strong selection of digital advertising operations skills and experiences. However, I was concerned that I wasn’t progressing into more senior roles and just seemed to be moving side-ways all the time.
Still, I paid off my car with the redundancy pay-out, so it wasn’t all bad.
It has been said that you shouldn’t live with your friends. The close proximity amplifies all the annoyances that go unnoticed at pubs, parties and sports events. After such gatherings, friends return to their separate homes without having to imagine how bad it would be to actually live with any of them.
I can now add that you shouldn’t join a start-up run by your friends either. Well, certainly not to the exclusion of due diligence. When a company is looking to hire you, you also need to consider that you are hiring the company. They are taking a gamble that you will be a suitable candidate and you need to be sure they won’t up and close within 12 months after you gave up a completely awesome opportunity to work with your friends.
My position was made redundant at Commonality in 2016. The two directors of the business, and the person I had replaced, were all previous work colleagues and friends. This made for an enjoyable and satisfying work environment but a painfully uncomfortable redundancy process. In this case, the Dreaded Letter of Immediately Paid-Out with No Prior Warning was handed across the office ping-pong table, which suggests that the business probably didn’t have its priorities right. Strong sales performance before pointless office distractions that no one has the time to use anyway.
Commonality was an indicative example of most of the companies I have worked at: my role was highly specialised, typically mostly independent and with no opportunity to move into a more senior role or ‘version’ of the role I was doing. This was all before becoming redundant.
There is something to be said for working in a start-up – the ad hoc nature of everything means there is opportunity for variety in every day. It also means that there is a certain fragility in the business structure and revenue streams.
The fifth company from which my position was made redundant, Allegiant Media, was still very much a start-up in 2019. However, it had benefited the year before by rising like a phoenix from the ashes of a previous company, Radium One. R1 had decided that 15 staff were 15 too many for the Australian market and headed for Singapore. Left behind were a couple of executives who founded Allegiant and a client database. Sure, I’ll give this scenario a crack.
By this stage in my career, I could sniff a redundancy months away. And so, it’s never good when a manager asks you for a meeting in the last couple of hours on a Friday.
With two kids, a mortgage and being in my early forties, I live with perpetual tiredness anyway, so I felt drained when the redundancy was confirmed, numb even. Where to from here?
Redundancy, Resumes and Interviews, Oh My!
Like day follows night, job hunting follows redundancy (unless you bought into bitcoin early and sold at the top of the crest, in which case you can’t be made redundant from your beachside mansion). Job hunting sucks. However, as I am quite experienced with dealing with redundancy, I am equally well-versed in the job-hunting process: update the resume, contact people you know on LinkedIn, submit details to relevant recruitment agencies and slap on your interview persona.
Some redundancies can be seen on the horizon, like a storm bearing down inevitably on a lonely soul stranded on an island. There is nowhere to go and no chance of preventing the storm’s arrival, but at least there is preparation time. A careful soon-to-be-cast-aside employee can start planning a break or get their resume updated, preferably both.
The other type is the redundancy that comes from nowhere. Preparation is impossible and it matters nought that you are working well with peers and managers, seemingly heading towards a common business objective. Suddenly cast aside, all you can do is watch the metaphorical ship of your former employer and colleagues continuing to sail towards goals that are no longer yours.
Whether anticipated or not, a redundancy can be a traumatic experience. Not only does it potentially leave the person in financial and career uncertainty, it disconnects a person from an important group of people and familiar support structure. We spend so many hours at work, thinking about work and travelling to and from work, that being suddenly, forcibly separated from that environment can be a tremendous upheaval. There can be a sense of rejection or betrayal and a potentially endless loop of “could I have worked better/harder to have made the redundancy unnecessary?”
The curse of the regularly retrenched person is a spiral of self-recrimination and doubt. I still wonder if I could have done anything to drive greater success in each company, thereby making the redundancy unnecessary. Could I have worked harder or smarter? Could I have done anything that might have made a difference? There can never be an answer. There is also no connection to the next employer, so being retrenched five times doesn’t mean I am going to get any special consideration to minimise the chance of number six.
There is always a career change. Redundancy doesn’t happen in book publishing, does it?
