Job Outplacement in Company's Restructuring Process: Experience of Procter&Gamble in Russia

Abstract

In the beginning of the nineties, Procter and Gamble did a unique acquisition of a detergent plant. P&G was one of the first foreign companies who acquired and after that restructured a former Soviet site. The company played the role of a pioneer in this new Russian business environment, especially in terms of outplacement of employees. The focus of the case is on the outplacement project that took place here from 1997 to 2000 during the restructuring. During the outplacement process P&G was faced with some challenges, namely a lot of valuable know-how and resources were forever lost for the local community, P&G did not have a proper plan of how to keep the best workers in the process, all redundancy packages were aimed at the senior part of the workforce, without any special incentives for workers with ambitions or special talent to stay.