*Diners
credit card payment and instalment welcomed
Bouquets
Two memorable
experiences stood out for me – one with my CEO and the other was with my
Chief HR Officer. The experience with my CEO occurred during his closing
address at one of my company’s leadership development programs. His simple
question was “What’s next?” This simple question if reflected and acted upon
earnestly, will prevent us from being complacent and drive us to
conscientiously think ahead always.
The second experience was a conversation with our CHRO during this year’s HR
leadership meeting. When asked what words of wisdom she could offer to guide
us into 2011, she said “Always stay close and relevant to the business”,
which we all knew was meant to inspire us to continue to add value and be
strategic partners to the business.
If I may add, I would say, “Stay close to doing what you love, stay relevant
and ahead by developing future capabilities needed to be successful in the
near future”.
Mr Christopher Goh Associate Lecturer, SHRI Academy
44th Joint Graduation Ceremony
SHRI RESEARCH CENTRE >>
Research Reports
SHRI-RDS
Survey on Financial Crisis, Pay and Actions 2009
SHRI in
conjunction with RDS surveyed 208 companies in January 2009
to find out about their wage increase, bonus and recruitment
plans as well as their cost-management measures in the face
of the current global financial crisis.
Summary
of Key Findings
Practically all companies have been impacted by the
current global crisis. However, many are hopeful of
being able to weather the financial storm. It is also
heartening that companies are cutting costs to save jobs
and not cutting jobs to save costs.
66% of
companies (compared to 91% six months ago) are still
satisfied with current business prospects but only 4%
(compared to 22%) are optimistic over the next six
months.
38% of
companies will freeze wages but only 3% have cut or plan
to cut wages. Basic wage increases this year will
average 1.5% significantly lower than 2008’s 4.7%.
Variable bonuses (excluding AWS) this year will average
1.5 to 1.7 months, lower than last year’s 2.0 to 2.4
months. This will result in a total wage decrease of 2%
for 2009 a significant drop from last year’s increase of
6.8%.
On
recruitment, only 40% of companies will be hiring this
year (compared to 63% last year).
So far
less than 18% of companies experienced staff turnover
(compared to 85% last year) and the turnover per company
is also lower than last year’s.
7% of
companies (compared to 10% last year) retrenched or plan
to retrench staff this year.
The
difficulties being experienced are severe sales drop,
cash flow/bad debt, funding and business uncertainties.
To cope
companies are resorting to measures such as aggressively
cutting non-labour costs (54%), staff retraining (27%),
cutting benefits (24%) and government assistance (23%).
Furthermore, 85% are hoping for cuts in utilities costs,
corporate tax (67%), rental (62%), GST (38%) and CPF
(11%).
.JPG){kind=small}
