Why multi-country consultation goes wrong
European restructuring programmes seldom fail on the business case. They fail on sequencing. Each country has its own trigger, its own representative body, its own timetable and its own consequence for getting it wrong, and the programme is usually being tracked in a spreadsheet that went stale a fortnight ago.
In Germany the Betriebsrat holds co-determination rights under the Betriebsverfassungsgesetz, and where agreement is not reached the Einigungsstelle is waiting. In France the CSE must be consulted under Code du Travail Article L.2312-8, with expert appointment rights that can add weeks to the timetable. In the Netherlands the Ondernemingsraad holds consent rights under Article 27 of the Wet op de Ondernemingsraden. Italy has the RSU, Spain the comité de empresa. If the programme is transnational, the European Works Council has to be informed and consulted as well, and in the right order.
Miss a step and the exposure is not only legal. It is a delayed go-live, a damaged relationship with a body you will sit opposite again next year, and a leadership team asking why nobody flagged it.
What Graylark does
One view of the whole programme. Change Proposals holds the change once and models it per impacted country, so each country team works to its own obligations while HQ sees a single picture of where every consultation has reached.
Country-specific obligations, not a generic checklist. Each impacted country carries its own representative bodies, its own steps and its own response deadlines. Country assessments are threaded conversations, so the reasoning stays attached to the decision instead of scattering across inboxes.
The representation map you are consulting into. ER Landscape holds employee representative bodies, legal entities, sites and collective agreements across the group, with FreshScore tracking how current that data is. You start the programme knowing which bodies exist and which agreements bind you, rather than finding out in week three.
Deadlines visible before they are breached. Overdue, due this week, blocked and unowned sit on the dashboard rather than in somebody’s head.
An audit trail by construction. Every step, document and response is recorded as it happens, so the evidence pack for a works council, a court or an internal audit is a by-product of running the process rather than a reconstruction afterwards.
GrAI for the reading. Graylark’s in-platform AI summarises agreements, compares documents and surfaces insight from previous changes. It runs entirely inside your tenant, with no external AI calls and no training on your data.
Who this is for
Directors and Heads of Employee Relations, labour and employment counsel, EWC coordinators and HR transformation leads in multinationals with a material European footprint, typically running continuous change across several jurisdictions at once.
See it on a real programme
Book a demo and we will walk a multi-country change end to end, or watch the Change Proposals tour first.
Every client runs in an isolated, EU-hosted tenant, and Graylark Technologies is Cyber Essentials certified at Whole Organisation scope. See our security and procurement page.
Related: Works council management, European Works Council software, Workforce change consultation.Cross-border restructuring consultation
When a restructure crosses six countries, the plan is rarely the hard part. The hard part is running six information and consultation processes on six different clocks, in six languages, without losing the thread or the evidence.