ยท 6 min read
Your IT team is too big: slimming engineering in Belgium.
The decision is usually months old, just not said out loud yet. What follows is not a spreadsheet exercise but a sequence, and in Belgium the law sets a large part of that sequence.
How do you know the team is actually too big?
An IT or engineering team is too big when it coordinates more than it delivers: the roadmap fits on one page but supposedly needs twenty people, the meeting calendar grew faster than the release notes, and nobody can say what would change with three fewer people. The signals are covered in when to right-size your engineering team. More important: slow is not the same as too big. A slow team with unclear priorities only gets slower after a layoff round.
What does Belgian employment law say?
Three things shape your plan, and none of them are on the board's slide.
- Notice periods. They grow with seniority: roughly 18 weeks after 5 years of service, 33 weeks after 10, to be worked or paid out. For a senior engineer with years of service, budget around half a year of salary cost per departure. That money is rarely in the saving finance calculated.
- Collective-dismissal thresholds. Within 60 days: from 10 dismissals at 21 to 99 employees, from 10 percent at 100 to 299, from 30 at 300 or more. Trying to stay just under them by spreading the round over time is a game unions and courts know well.
- The Renault act. Above the thresholds, an information and consultation round is required before any decision is final. That moves your timeline by months and changes your communication entirely; the full sequence is in what the Renault procedure changes.
From 30 weeks of notice, a mandatory outplacement offer comes on top. And leave the exact calculations to your payroll bureau or an employment lawyer: these are the orders of magnitude that shape the plan, not the decimals.
The sequence that works
- Diagnosis first, then the list. Decide on delivery evidence who the business needs, not on who is cheapest to lose. A round that sends out the wrong people gets paid for twice.
- One round, not three. Three small rounds demoralise more than one clean one. The people who stay should hear the reasoning the same day, face to face.
- Restructure along with it. Fewer people in the same structure is the same slowness with fewer people. Teams get a named lead and a scope short enough to say out loud.
- Cut the roadmap along with the team. The case study from 45 to 22 shows how 22 people turned out to ship more than 45 had been shipping.
What it yields, in orders of magnitude
A fully loaded engineer in Belgium costs roughly EUR 85 000 to EUR 110 000 a year. Ten departures are therefore about EUR 1 000 000 a year, against one-off exit costs that, depending on seniority, often land at 30 to 50 percent of one year of saving. The payback of a cleanly executed round is usually under 6 months. The most expensive variant is not the round itself, but the round that comes a year late or drives out the best people.
This is not legal advice; the figures are orders of magnitude for planning. For the execution you need a payroll bureau or employment lawyer, and someone who has done it before.