Restructuring: 5 Health and Safety Questions Nobody Asks
Technology and financial firms restructure frequently. Funding cycles change, products are sunset, functions are consolidated into a shared services centre, teams are moved between entities, and headcount is adjusted upwards and downwards on a timescale that would have looked erratic twenty years ago.
Those exercises are run by HR, finance and legal, advised on employment process, and executed with considerable care about consultation obligations and settlement terms.
Almost none of them involve the health and safety function, and yet HSE's own framework identifies change as one of the six areas a risk assessment should cover. The Management Standards list demands, control, support, relationships, role and change, and a restructure engages at least four of them simultaneously.
Five questions, and none requires slowing anything down.
1. Has anybody assessed the change itself?
The threshold question, and the answer is usually no.
Regulation 3 of the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999 requires a suitable and sufficient assessment of the risks to the health of employees, and health includes mental health. A restructure alters demand, removes control, disrupts relationships, changes roles and is itself the change dimension.
That does not mean producing a document nobody reads. It means somebody competent asking, before the announcement rather than after, which groups are most exposed, what the pressure points are, and what can reasonably be done about them.
The organisations that handle this well tend to do it as part of the planning rather than as a review afterwards, and it takes a conversation rather than a project. Acas publishes guidance on redundancy covering the process obligations that run alongside.
2. What happens to the people who remain?
The exposure that lasts longest and is planned for least.
Attention concentrates on those leaving, which is humane and correct. The people who stay absorb the work that does not disappear with the headcount, frequently without a corresponding change to targets, and they do it while colleagues are leaving and the future is uncertain.
Three specific consequences worth checking.
Workload transfer. Where a function loses a proportion of its people, the tasks are redistributed. If nobody has decided which tasks stop, the answer is that none of them do.
Loss of the person who knew. Institutional knowledge concentrates in individuals, and a voluntary scheme tends to remove exactly those with the most options. That is a resilience issue and a workload issue at once.
Single points of failure. A team of four reduced to two has a concentration where it previously had depth, which reaches on-call rotas, key person dependencies and the ability of anyone to take leave.
The useful discipline is to state explicitly what the remaining team will stop doing. Where nothing is stopping, that is a decision the organisation should make deliberately rather than discover.
3. Who is delivering the news, and what support do they have?
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The population nobody counts.
Line managers, HR business partners and sometimes team leads conduct these conversations, often several in a day, often about people they have worked alongside for years, and often while uncertain about their own position.
That is a foreseeable psychosocial exposure created by a work arrangement the organisation designed. The controls are practical: limit how many conversations one person conducts in a day, brief them properly rather than handing over a script, give them somewhere to go afterwards, and make clear they may say they do not know rather than improvising.
Where conversations may become confrontational, the arrangements covered in our work on violence at work apply. HSE publishes guidance on violence at work, and the practical elements are somebody else in the building, a room with a clear exit, and a stated position that a meeting can be ended.
4. What changes physically, and who owns the new arrangement?
The operational half, and it is where safety arrangements quietly break.
A restructure almost always changes the building. Floors consolidate, teams move, space is given up, and density on the remaining floors rises.
Five things routinely go stale at exactly this moment.
Fire wardens and first aiders. They leave with everybody else, and cover is calculated against a population that has changed. Nobody notices until a drill.
Evacuation arrangements. Personal evacuation plans attach to individuals and to routes. Both change.
The risk assessment. It describes an occupancy and a layout that no longer exist, and a move or a consolidation is a significant change requiring review.
Named roles. The competent person, the person who holds the landlord relationship, the person who runs the permit arrangement. These frequently sit with individuals rather than with roles, and they leave.
Density and welfare. Toilets, kitchens and ventilation are calculated against people present. Consolidating three floors into two changes the arithmetic even when total headcount falls.
The practical answer is a short handover check: which named safety roles were held by people who are leaving, and who holds them now.
5. Are people still able to raise concerns?
The cultural question, and it determines whether you find out about anything else on this list.
During a restructure, people become markedly less likely to report problems, raise hazards or push back on workload. The reasoning is obvious and rational: nobody wants to look difficult while selection is being decided.
Two things follow. Your reporting data will understate reality for the duration and for some time afterwards, so a fall in reports during a restructure should be read as a fall in reporting rather than in incidents.
And the protections matter more, not less. Workers have statutory protection from detriment for raising health and safety concerns in defined circumstances, and where reports of harassment are involved the whistleblowing position has recently been strengthened. Restating those protections during a restructure costs nothing and is precisely when it is worth doing.
The five, in short
| Question | Usual position | What is needed |
|---|---|---|
| Assessed the change | Not considered | Competent input before the announcement |
| Those who remain | Attention on leavers | State explicitly what stops |
| Those delivering it | Uncounted | Limit conversations, brief, support, allow "I don't know" |
| Physical arrangements | Assumed unchanged | Handover check on named roles and cover |
| Ability to raise concerns | Assumed constant | Restate protections; read reporting data with caution |
Row four is the quickest to close and the most conspicuous if something happens. Row two is the one that produces harm months later, long after the restructure is considered finished.
For international groups
Two considerations, and the second changes the obligation rather than the practice.
Consultation requirements differ sharply, and in several jurisdictions covered in this series the health and safety representative or committee has a distinct role from the works council or union. Croatia, Slovenia, Bulgaria, Slovakia, Latvia and Lithuania all provide for safety representatives with statutory functions, and a group running a single consultation process may satisfy the employment obligation and miss the safety one.
Psychosocial risk is expressly regulated in a growing number of them. France, Sweden, Denmark, Australia, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Colombia, Lithuania and Slovenia all treat organisational working conditions as a regulated matter. In those entities, a restructure that increases workload without assessment is not merely poor practice, and Slovenia goes further by requiring a funded health promotion plan inside a statutory document.
Holding assessments, named roles and reporting data across every entity in one register is where health and safety consultants and software are worth more together than either alone, and periodic health and safety audits reliably find arrangements that were correct before the last reorganisation.
Where Arinite fits
Arinite works on the parts of organisational change that nobody has been asked to look at, which is where the arrangements quietly stop describing the organisation. We support 1,500+ businesses across 50+ countries and protect 100,000+ employees, with 95%+ client retention over 15+ years. Our health and safety consultants work extensively with IT and software, finance and banking and professional services organisations, where restructuring is frequent and the safety function is rarely in the room.
Where entities sit in several countries, our global health and safety consultants establish what each jurisdiction requires of consultation and psychosocial assessment, and our international health and safety consultants keep that current. HSE's material on work-related stress and Acas guidance on managing work-related stress cover the underlying framework.
If your organisation reorganised in the last year and nobody checked who now holds the named safety roles, a free gap analysis is the right place to start.
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Arinite Health & Safety Consultants
Health & Safety Expert at Arinite
