Such has been the level of attrition in the employment market there has been a tendency over recent years to think of HR as being the buffer zone between employment and redundancy. But this would be to undermine the major strides made by the discipline formerly known as "personnel management", as well as to underestimate the role that HR is going to have to play to ensure our eventual economic recovery.

Human Resources will be tasked with managing a number of highly sensitive and strategically important issues over the coming years, including the best way to manage redundancies, the appropriate way to reward employees (which is a hot topic in December 2010 thanks to the manoeuvrings of certain financial institutions) and how to manage remaining employees who may be lacking in motivation. These are some of the topics which were addressed at a free-of-charge half-day workshop which was hosted on Friday, December 17 by the National College of Ireland (NCI) in association with CIPD, the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development.

"Redundancies are still happening in Ireland, though the pace has slowed," said event organiser Rachel Doherty, course director for the CIPD programmes at NCI, who spoke on how to manage employees in a post-redundancy situation. "In fact, a lot of companies carried out their redundancies a couple of years ago, and these now need to move on. A lot of the employees who have been left behind may be suffering from a sort of "survivor syndrome", which is characterised by mistrust in management and a general feeling of disengagement, which can manifest itself in a "why should I bother" attitude. In this situation, employees may not go the extra mile for the company because they have seen what has happened to their friends – and this can have a major financial impact on the company."

Of course, battling the after-effects of a major redundancy programme is just one of the elements that HR departments have to deal with in modern Ireland. A more immediate issue is the redundancy programme itself, which has to be managed correctly – and, in an innovative segment of the workshop, Doherty actually "fired" one of her colleagues in front of the audience (the Sunday Tribune was assured that the "dismissal" was for show purposes only...), with the process critiqued down to the finest detail, including everything from the legality of the action to the communication style used.

Other topics explored included a presentation by consultant Elaine Rossiter on how to reward employees in a cost-constrained environment – a subject which has received close scrutiny from practically every segment of the economy over the past two weeks.

"Despite what has happened, there is a need to get on with the day-to-day running of a business," explained Doherty. "A lot of HR is about how to keep staff happy at a time when there is huge pressure on a company's finances, and it's true to say that a lot of those skills were lost during the Celtic Tiger years. But it's also true to say that a lot of labour cost reduction processes have been handled differently during this recession as a result of the influence of HR at a strategic level.

"We had to look back to the last UK recession to compare the different approaches, where people were made redundant too quickly," she continued. "This time around, companies are far more innovative in how they go about reducing labour costs, and more likely to resort to pay cuts and a shorter working week than reaching for redundancy."

Indeed, if there have been any positives coming out of the recession, one is that the strategic importance of HR has been unequivocally copperfastened. Thanks to enlightened HR thinking, management is no longer making decisions based on cold hard figures – instead, it is considering the psychological effects of redundancies on the remaining workforce before deciding to dispense with some of their greatest assets.