Aberthaw: the story of a closure
As management tasks go, handling the impact of large-scale redundancies is about as tough as it gets. We talked to Julia Heslop, former operations manager at the nowdecommissioned Aberthaw Power Station, about how to do the task with dignity
Julia Heslop will never forget 2 August 2019. At the time, she was an operations manager at Aberthaw Power Station in south Wales. She and all 150 employees there knew that the coal-fired plant was going to close at some point, but most were expecting it to happen in the autumn of 2021. Instead, Julia got an email at 7:30 that morning asking her to come in to the plant for a meeting at 8am. There, she and other team members received the news that the plant would be closing in March 2020. The process of informing the staff and ultimately
decommissioning the plant was to begin straight away. The next few months would test the Kiwi manager, who was 39 at the time, to her limits. But, drawing on deeply held personal values, the relationships she’d built up with colleagues over a number of years and the support of her own managers, today Julia looks back at the process with satisfaction at a management job well done. The hours and days immediately after the plant’s closure date was confirmed had a huge emotional impact. Many employees were not on
“ I always tried to put myself in my team member’s shoes and do what I could to support them both practically and in terms of understanding their emotional reactions” -------
site and therefore needed to be told by phone. Julia and her fellow managers had to call each person individually to break the news. “I had sheets and sheets of names to call. To begin with, I didn’t know whether I was strong enough to do it. I spoke to one young man who’d just got married and others who were going through divorce. It was really tough.” The core value she drew on was empathy. “I always tried to put myself in my team member’s shoes and do what I could to support them both practically and in terms of understanding their emotional reactions,” she says. And the emotions M AN AGER S .ORG.UK — 65
