Some people fight restructures with protests and walkouts — and some people fight them with paperwork and patience.

When a new HR chief unveiled a 400-page plan to strip leadership across an entire hospital, the union agreed to every condition with a straight face and a quiet plan to make them reconsider.

The restructure moved forward exactly as promised, but HR soon came to regret it dearly when they bore the biggest consequences.

Keep reading for the full story.

HR restructure troubles

So I work in health and I’m also the union delegate for my hospital.

I’m often called upon by the union to offer advice to other workplaces with their issues.

The only surprising thing about health managers’ decisions is that they continue to surprise me with “interesting” decisions.

This employee further explains the context.

So my union represents everyone in health except doctors and nurses.

We represent cleaners, clerks, physiotherapists, speech pathologists, radiographers, porters, security, etc., and even managers up to the executive level.

The new HR boss notified the union of an upcoming restructure and published a mammoth 400-plus page document about what they were doing.

These were some pretty damaging changes.

It was a slash and burn to middle management. Basically making the department head look after three times as much, and claiming it will improve management of the workforce.

It won’t. It will strip leadership and clinical oversight out of the hospitals.

So some ground rules were put in place.

We got to the first meeting to discuss the restructure, and HR proposed a few things we agreed on.

1. That all affected staff will be consulted in an honest and genuine manner.
2. Everyone being made redundant will get full entitlements.
3. That the union cannot be involved with non-union members.
4. All departments undergoing restructure will not employ any new staff for two years, except for clinical staff. (They thought we were being helpful with this, but we had a plan.)

So the change started with HR’s department.

The first department to be restructured was the HR department.

The staff (union members) on the ground were left alone, however the entire executive (non-union members) were let go, leaving just the new head of HR.

Over a dozen senior HR executives were gone.

This put a ton of work on the leader of the department.

Now the head of HR was trying to deal with 40-50 HR staff by herself (she did get more pay out of all this) and the restructure in an organisation of thousands of staff.

We heard stories of her working 16 hours a day, seven days a week.

The head of HR scheduled a union meeting to discuss the next department to be restructured.

So they sought input from the rest of the company.

We got every manager to document all their concerns, plus the staff under them to do the same.

The first department outside HR to be restructured — and we responded with a 300-page document basically expressing concerns and asking over 500 unique questions.

We reminded her of the first point we agreed on about genuine consultation.

Then the HR head started to change her mind, but when she realized she couldn’t go back, she was furious.

She then confessed that she needed more staff and asked if we could break our agreement.

We reminded her of point four — no new staff for two years.

She also balked at this level of consultation, and we headed to industrial court, where the judge ruled in our favour.

Her job was now a living nightmare.

She now had this enormous amount of work to do and over 500 questions to respond to.

We heard both the CEO and board were very annoyed by the lack of progress.

In six weeks we got an email about her going on indefinite leave. We never saw her again.

None of her replacements could handle it either.

Three more HR managers came and went in the next 18 months — none of them could deal with the workload.

The restructure never went further than HR. No union member job losses.

Sounds like this restructure never should have been proposed in the first place.

What did Reddit think?

This user is surprised HR ever agreed to go first.

This HR boss had no idea how bad her plan really was until it was too late.

A more capable HR boss would have never agreed to these terms.

Maybe HR really was the best place to make cuts.

A bold plan isn’t the same thing as a good idea.

If you liked that story, check out this post about an oblivious CEO who tells a web developer to “act his wage”… and it results in 30% of the workforce being laid off.