Companies must be responsible and sensitive when terminating staff

EYEBROWS were raised when it was reported last month that Surbana Jurong - a Temasek Holdings-owned infrastructure consultancy - had sacked 54 employees, with senior management publicly stating that they were being let go due to their poor performance.

The timing of the termination exercise was rather unfortunate, coming just a few weeks before the start of the Chinese New Year. The affected workers, too, worried about their future job prospects given the depressed economic outlook for the year that has forced more companies to freeze their hiring.

But it was the fact that a major employer - Surbana has some 3,000 staff in Singapore and about 13,000 worldwide - chose to brazenly brand those terminated as "poor performers" that rankled. The company could not let a small group of "poor performers" drag down the rest of the organisation, the CEO had said, insisting that the axeing wasn't a retrenchment exercise.