I said something at our book launch last week that got a laugh from the room, and then a silence that lasted a beat too long.
“Because if you come in too late, someone’s going to want to take over, and God help you if he’s the CFO.”
The Business Times ran it as their headline the next morning: Don’t let the CFO take over retrenchments, urges HR expert. Which is fair. But the line only lands if you know the story behind it.
On 30 July, Sze-Yen Chee and I launched the second edition of Responsible Retrenchment: The Exit Management Handbook at High Street Centre. NTUC assistant secretary-general Patrick Tay opened the evening, and the room was almost entirely HR practitioners… the people who actually have to sit in that meeting room and deliver the news.
What struck me over the course of the night was not what they asked. It was what they assumed. Most of them believed they had far less authority over a retrenchment exercise than they actually do.
The Exercise That Became A Spreadsheet
A while back, I watched a company retrench about 40 people.
HR took a back seat on that one. The CFO took the wheel, and within two meetings the entire conversation had shifted onto how much the company could save, whether commissions could be withheld, what payments could be trimmed at the edges.
“Suddenly, it became very clinical. Suddenly, it became a financial project, and, needless to say, it had a lot of negative repercussions about it.”
None of that was malice… a CFO optimising for cost is a CFO doing his job. The failure was upstream, in the fact that nobody with a mandate for people was in the room when the exercise was being designed.
Here is what I would tell any HR leader reading this.
1. You Have A Seat At The Table. Use It On Day One.
Most HR practitioners are never formally taught how to run a retrenchment. It isn’t in the HR diploma, it isn’t in the certification, and for most people the first one they run is the first one they’ve ever seen. So they wait to be invited… and by the time the invitation comes, the decisions that mattered have already been made.
Get involved at the point where the business is still asking whether, not how many. That is where HR’s influence is highest and where it costs the company the least to change course.
2. Retrenchment Should Not Be The First Tool You Reach For
Before anyone reaches for headcount, there are questions worth forcing onto the table. Can these people be redeployed into another role? Can they be retooled and reskilled into the roles the business actually needs next year?
That’s arithmetic rather than sentimentality. Singapore’s local workforce is shrinking, hiring good people is slow and expensive, and a fair amount of what companies are cutting in 2026 they will be trying to rehire in 2027.
The way you earn the right to ask those questions is by being the person in the building who genuinely knows the alternatives, the obligations, and the numbers. Become the subject matter expert, and you stop being the department that processes decisions… you become the department that shapes them.
3. Push Back On The Process, And On The Timing
One company I know had planned a retrenchment for the week before Chinese New Year. Not out of cruelty. The exercise had been planned out of the US, where the calendar simply doesn’t register. It took their HR director objecting to move it.
That is the job. Sometimes doing the right thing is not easy, and doing the easy thing is not always right, so you need to be able to push back… on the processes, and on the timing as well.
The Two Mistakes Almost Everyone Makes
Beyond the CFO problem, two errors show up again and again.
The first is underestimating how long a retrenchment takes to plan properly. Leaders tend to think in weeks when they should be thinking in months, and the compression is where the mistakes get made.
The second is forgetting the people who stay. GovTech got a great deal right in its own exercise and still missed this group. Communicate badly with the survivors and productivity drops, trust erodes, and your best performers start taking recruiter calls because they assume they’re next. You can execute a technically flawless exit and still lose the company more value on the other side of it.
Why We Wrote A Second Edition
The first edition of Responsible Retrenchment came out in 2019. Singapore’s landscape has moved a long way since then: updated notification requirements, a tighter mid-career job market, and the Workplace Fairness Act 2025, which comes into force by the end of 2027 and will change what “fair selection” legally means.
The second edition adds recent case studies of companies that got it wrong, guidance on managing the digital narrative around a retrenchment, and practical advice from senior HR leaders who have actually run these exercises. We’ve written it as a living document, so if you download it you’ll get the updates as the rules change.
If you’re an HR leader who suspects a conversation is coming in the next six months, read it before the conversation starts, not after. And if you want the view from the other side of the table, I wrote about why 2027 may bring more of these exercises, not fewer.
Read the full Business Times report: Don’t let the CFO take over retrenchments, urges HR expert
