Developer offers staff redundancy
One of New Zealand’s busiest townhouse developers is offering voluntary redundancy to staff amid a sales slump, saying otherwise some will have ‘‘nothing to do’’.
Williams Corporation, whose young founders travel around the country in private jets, has gone from selling 800 homes in a year to 500.
Managing director Matthew Horncastle says the business remains profitable, but there is not enough work to go around. ‘‘Essentially if we continue trading into next year with current staff, we will have a percentage of our workforce with physically nothing to do,’’ he said.
After consulting staff about reducing overheads and ‘‘rightsizing’’ the business, voluntary redundancy had been offered to most of the company’s 200 employees. Ten – about 5% of employees – had already taken up the offer, Horncastle said.
He hoped to avoid layoffs, but sales would probably need to pick up this year for that. Staff were told this week that overheads needed to be cut by 15% to 30%, according to The New Zealand Herald.
Horncastle guessed about 10% of staff would take up the redundancy offer. Those who did would get an extra month of pay on top of their contractual redundancy entitlements, he said.
‘‘We’re essentially paying them extra if the job’s not right for them,’’ Horncastle said.
After the voluntary redundancies, Horncastle said he would ‘‘let that settle’’ and in and, after about three months, he would look at sales ‘‘and then make any further appropriate decisions’’.
If 10% of staff accepted voluntary redundancies and sales increased in the summer, the team and sales would be aligned correctly, he said.
‘‘Hopefully just through voluntary redundancies and some other things we can do around the edges, we can get our workforce to the right size without any compulsory redundancies,’’ he said.
Horncastle, 29, founded Williams Corporation about a decade ago with his friend Blair Chappell.
Most of its townhouse projects are in Auckland and Christchurch. The company also has offices in Singapore and the Philippines.