In July 2018, DRB-HICOM Berhad completed a voluntary separation scheme (VSS) to all staff at the headquarters. This scheme was part of an on-going reorganisation of the Group that began in 2016, designed to prepare the Group to meet current and future challenges that are present and will appear in the sectors that it is involved in. The reorganisation was followed by structural changes, shifts in business direction and also the creation of new pursuits across the Group.
A story that appeared on an online automotive portal on 6 September 2018 stated that 20 “very senior and prominent executives” were leaving the company. The speculative article seemed to suggest that this was an extraordinary “mass departure”.
Arguably, a voluntary separation scheme enables both parties to cease a professional relationship on positive and mutually rewarding terms. The organisation of a separation scheme does not necessarily mean that a company is in troubled waters. A separation scheme enables employees to receive a financial package to tide them over for a period, or to retire on, depending on the circumstances.
Employees that opt for a separation scheme have an opportunity to embrace new challenges elsewhere within the industry or in a new industry. Similarly, employees that remain too may take up new challenges in the company, wherever the departures leave a vacant position to be filled.
41 DRB-HICOM employees were given their VSS letters effective 31 August 2018, and were all from the headquarters in Shah Alam. The scheme was not extended to operating companies such as PROTON Holdings.
A simple ceremony was held on 30 August to allow the staff – some of whom have served DRB-HICOM (either as a merged entity or as the two separate companies prior to 2006) since 1982 – to say farewell to the company they have served for so long. As a gesture of goodwill, DRB-HICOM will continue to support the departing staff with their respective healthcare and hospitalisation benefits until the end of the current financial year on 31 March 2019.
