Severance Insurance

Human resource folks aren't all that bad, in spite of my cynicism. They just need to be able to justify a change in strategy from their perspective. My experience is that HR talks one way to displaced employees and another way to retained employees. Fundamentally, I think they are intimidated by the potential power that a displaced employee has, so they tend to acquiesce to virtually any threat. On the other hand, their response to a disenfranchised retained worker might be along the lines of, "Just be happy you have a job." Many benefit vendors/consultants report that their overview of HR personnel is that they act as the self-appointed guardians of displaced employees and all the benefits that inure to them and struggle to see any positives in changes to those benefits.

So, if their perspective is one of guardian, then severance insurance needs to bring more to the table than "just" an alternative funding strategy that happens to have the potential to save substantial sums of money. Enter what I have called in earlier blogs "service severance".
If service severance, as I see it, can be justified to HR folks as a far superior and constructive approach than outplacement, then maybe they begin to grab onto the idea that there might be a better mousetrap in the world of severance. What am I saying here? I am saying that corporations need to go the extra mile and add service severance to financial severance, if for no other reason than to get the buy-in of their own HR executives.

I'm going to spend some time to better flesh out my ideas for service severance in future blogs.

willy