Right-sizing an engineering team in Belgium: what the Renault procedure changes about your plan.

Every founder I meet who is about to right-size an engineering team in Belgium has a plan with the wrong shape. Not the wrong headline. The wrong shape. The plan says: decide in week 1, tell people in week 2, done by the end of the month. The Renault procedure says otherwise, and it is not negotiable.

This is the piece I wish someone had handed me the first time. It is what the law does to your plan, in the order it does it.

What triggers it

The 1998 law, named after the Renault plant at Vilvoorde, governs collective dismissal. You are in it when, inside a window of 60 days, you intend to end the contracts of a number of people for reasons that have nothing to do with them personally. The thresholds run off the size of the technical operating unit:

• at least 10 people, in a unit with more than 20 and fewer than 100 employees;
• at least 10 percent of the workforce, in a unit with 100 to 299 employees;
• at least 30 people, in a unit with 300 or more.

Read that twice with your own numbers. A 90-person company cutting 12 engineers is in the procedure. A 250-person company cutting 12 engineers is not. That single line decides whether your right-sizing takes 6 weeks or 4 months, and founders routinely get it wrong because they count the engineering team instead of the legal entity.

Phase one: you announce an intention, not a decision

You inform the works council in writing. No works council, then the union delegation. Neither, then the employees themselves. The written report has to carry the reasons, the number and categories of people concerned, the number and categories normally employed, the period the dismissals would run over, and how any severance beyond the statutory minimum is calculated.

Then you consult. The representatives ask questions and put counter-proposals. You have to answer them, in writing, in substance. And here is the part that breaks plans: during phase one, nobody can be given notice. Not the person who already knows. Not the one who asked to be first out. Nobody.

There is no statutory maximum for this phase. In practice it runs 4 to 8 weeks, longer if the counter-proposals are serious or the council thinks you are going through the motions. If you skip it or fake it, dismissed employees can ask for reinstatement, and the notice periods you thought were running were not running.

Phase two: the 30 days you cannot compress

You notify the director of the regional employment service. From that notification a waiting period of 30 days runs before any dismissal takes effect, and the director can push it to 60. On top of that, if the operation counts as a restructuring you owe an employment cell and outplacement for the people leaving.

So the honest arithmetic, from the day you tell the works council to the day people actually leave, is 2 to 4 months. Add the notice periods themselves, which under the single employment status scale with seniority and can be worked or bought out. Your board's spreadsheet almost certainly assumed 1 month.

The part that is actually good news

Belgium does not impose a selection method. There is no last in, first out, and no statutory reflection principle. You choose who stays, on criteria you set, as long as those criteria are not discriminatory and you can explain them out loud to a works council that will ask.

This matters more than founders realise. In an over-hired engineering org, the people you most need to keep are usually the recent senior hires, and the people whose scope has quietly evaporated are often the longest tenured. Belgium lets you make that call on merit. Use it, and write the criteria down before you look at names, not after. The moment the criteria are visibly reverse-engineered from a list of individuals, you have lost the room and possibly the case.

The pattern I keep seeing

A scale-up decides on a Friday to take engineering from 40 to 24. The founder wants it announced Monday, because holding the secret over a weekend feels unbearable. Legal says the works council goes first. Engineering leadership, meanwhile, has already told 3 managers, and one of them has told a partner who works at a customer.

By the time the formal announcement lands, the 16 people know, the 24 who are staying know, and the counter-proposals arrive with a sharpness that says the council heard it from the floor. The procedure then takes 5 months instead of 3, because trust is gone and every question has to be answered twice.

The fix is unglamorous. Decide the shape before you decide the names. Get the legal sequence on a calendar before anyone outside a group of 3 hears a word. Then run the sequence properly and at speed, because the compression you are looking for is in phase one preparation, not in the 30 days you cannot compress.

When not to start

If you cannot articulate the shape of the org on the other side, do not open phase one. The procedure forces you to publish your reasoning to people whose jobs depend on it. Half-formed reasoning does not survive that. And if the number you need is below the threshold, do not round it up to get the tidiness of a single process. Individual dismissals, properly done, are faster and less corrosive.

Right-sizing is the work I take on. See right-sizing on the homepage, or the piece on when to right-size and when not to. If your entity is Dutch rather than Belgian, the mechanics are different and slower: WMCO, UWV, and the timeline the board did not budget for.

Written from patterns I've seen across engagements. If any of it sounds too specific to be general, that's why. This is how the process has run in the rooms I've been in, not legal advice. Get a Belgian or Dutch employment lawyer in the room early.