Reality HR May

Lynda Fan

HR manager

Verigy

The greatest HR challenge for me in a downturn is always facing the possibility of conducting a retrenchment exercise. It is never a nice thing to do. Just last September, when Singapore was in an economic upturn, we were facing high attrition problems across the industry. And in just a turn of a quarter, we are facing a different scenario now.

We have to be very diverse [capability-wise] and we have to be very prepared to adapt accordingly. It is about agility, learning from our experiences and thinking of how to improve from there [keeping the attrition rates down to giving notification letters].

Besides organising the logistics and coaching the managers on how to notify axed employees during a retrenchment exercise, HR has to sit down and think about how we should handle this. What is the best way to do this? At the end of it, we are also humans. Nobody likes to do this but for the impacted employees’ sake, we have to be fair and reasonable in terms of compensating them. Finally, it is very important to treat staff with respect and dignity. 

For HR, we are actually managing [retrenchment] for the organisation and also the employees so we have to respect them. It [retrenchment] is a result of business needs so we tell them, “That’s why we need to do this” and employees understand that. Communication is very important because being honest and giving them updated information on the company’s performance can help keep emotions in check.