83% of Malaysian companies not considering layoffs: Survey

A recent survey conducted by Korn Ferry showed that 83% of Malaysian companies are not considering permanent staff layoffs or redundancies, but are rather focusing on people cost management measures such as salaries, short-term incentives and annual bonuses.

Of the Malaysian respondents in the survey, 17% of organisations are cancelling or delaying annual increases, and 13% reducing or delaying short-term incentives and annual bonuses. 13% of companies are also looking at suspension of promotion increases to manage costs.

Korn Ferry APAC Rewards & Benefits leader Mary Chua pointed out that the ability to limit the impact from this global pandemic has severely stress-tested organisations in the last few months.

“Malaysia is one of the earliest countries to introduce lock down measures which are still in place with conditions. One of its key economic pillars – the oil & gas industry – has also been considerably impacted by the sharp decline in global oil prices. Naturally, this has greater revenue implications for many organisations in Malaysia,” she said.

The survey results also showed that 31 % of Malaysian companies are expecting their 2020 revenue to decline by more than 30%, compared to 22% of companies surveyed in APAC.

Of the 31%, around 2 in 5 organisations anticipate their revenue to decline by more than 50%, one of the highest in the region.

On the other hand, while companies are doing everything they can to contain people costs, they are also looking at how to provide additional work support to staff as most of their workforce is working from home.

Half of Malaysian organisations also say their biggest HR challenge is measuring and improving the work efficiency of remote workers.

Most companies acknowledged that post-Covid 19, there will be several things they will do differently learning from their experience of navigating the sharp and severe disruption brought on by the global pandemic.

Chua said firms will come out from the lock down stronger as they put in place measures from the learnings they had.

“Of these measures, greater flexibility and discipline in cost management and introducing more people engagement initiatives are the most prevalent.

“Costs tightening has an inverse relationship with employee engagement, so our emphasis to clients on costs containment is the effectiveness and sustainability of these measures, and having a robust approach to communications and change management,” she added.

Source: The Sun Daily