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Public Sector staff cuts will start in earnest in 2011. Organisations will be working to roll back the 600,000 of new public sector jobs that have been created since Labour took power, but how can public sector organisations prepare for redundancies?

Any restructuring programme needs to work through a process of identifying staff who will be affected by a restructuring programme and then leading the individuals affected through a process of change that may culminate with them leaving the organisation. Too many restructuring projects, however, are started without knowing who actually works for the organisation and what they do. Although it is easy to match payroll feeds with IT data, this does not take account of the contractors, consultants, temps and volunteers that need to be added to those staff on the payroll to get a full understanding of an organisation's workforce.

Getting a good picture of the whole workforce can bring three significant benefits to any restructuring project.

Firstly, the cost of restructuring can be reduced by focussing on contract and temp staff. Secondly, it becomes easier to spot incongruities in resourcing between departments. Finally, it provides a baseline to ensure reductions are kept in place and are not undermined by the hiring of new contractors to replace those being made redundant.

For a restructuring programme to be credible, it is important to be able to show that the organisation has taken significant steps towards cutting costs and delivering efficiencies before resorting to making redundancies. With so little time to prepare for what is expected to be large scale budget cuts, it is imperative to initiate greater control of procurement spend and to reduce unnecessary expenditure.

Taking control of cost reductions means making sure that your organisation is using e-auctions and has a ' no purchase order, no payment' policy which is essential for controlling spend. Once these programmes are being put into place it is easier to communicate restructuring as part of a wider cost reduction initiative.

Flexi-time initiatives can prove an effective way to retain knowledge and expertise at the same time as reducing costs. Many staff will prefer to accept a cut in pay rather than lose their job, and will be more open to flexible working and other job restructuring initiatives such as job sharing between authorities.

Service transformation initiatives and IT projects often highlight the potential for fractional staff reductions, with departments being expected to serve up savings that are equivalent to quarter of an FTE or less, which previously might be difficult to convert into bottom line cash savings. However, these initiatives are an excellent trigger to a restructuring project and flexi-working and a reduction in temp staffing can be used to deliver bottom line savings from these initiatives.

Restructuring is never easy. It will affect all the staff in an organisation, including those left behind. Throughout any restructuring project it is imperative that you communicate with staff, but right now is the time to explain to staff your understanding of the challenge you face, how you intend to meet that challenge and what they can expect to happen over the coming year in terms of restructuring. When you communicate with staff you should outline the ambitions for the organisation, its goals and future strategy and relate any restructuring to these ambitions.

Communicating with staff needs to be done directly, and where possible in person, but also it can be done through third parties such as unions, advisors and line managers. Staff will need to be engaged repeatedly over a number of weeks before they understand the full implications of your restructuring project. Now is the time to start communicating with them.

Public sector redundancies will have a significant impact on local communities, supporting ex-employees to find new work should be more than helping them write up a CV and write an application letter. Post-redundancy support needs to be so much more involving to be effective for ex-employees. As well as career counselling and advice on interview skills there are other steps that public sector bodies can take to support staff:

* Promoting ex-employees to existing suppliers to see if there are any vacancies for staff in the businesses that thrive from the public sector.

* Helping staff to start their own businesses, providing desk space and other facilities in order to nurture the local employees of tomorrow.

* Working with voluntary organisations and charities to help ex-employees to gain new skills in exchange for volunteering.

All of these steps can help an organisation prepare for the difficulty of handling redundancies. If you want to find out more about any of the issues discussed in this article, get in touch.