As Vietnam is grappling with the continued impacts of COVID-19, HR professionals struggle to navigate their workforce through the crisis, while maintaining business performance. Adecco Vietnam’s latest survey aims to take a closer look at how hard the novel coronavirus is hitting business in terms of revenue and labor force, and how about Vietnamese businesses preparation for this 'second wave'' to transform their future workforce.

The research brought together a sample of 330 HR specialists in May. Most of them are at the manager or director level, working in multinational companies in Vietnam and 77% of whom filled out the questionnaires completely.

According to the survey, 93% of companies’ financial performance has been affected by COVID-19. Among those, 43% severely impacted businesses saw revenue declining up to 21-40%. The top three industries with revenue negatively struck by COVID-19 are Food & Beverages (47%), Real Estate (56%), and Manufacturing (44%).

Alongside declining revenue and business activities, many companies face tough decisions on their labor force, including employee layoffs or salary reductions. 30% business reduce the number of employees from 1-20% and 16% business even must cut down 21-40% their headcounts.

On the brighter side, regardless of no positive signal for the revenue in supply chain & logistics, up to 62% of companies in this sector maintain their workforce, and only 7.69% of companies suffer 21-40% layoffs. Other sectors that have a high rate of no employee layoffs are IT (55%) and Finance & Insurance (54%).

For further risk mitigation, 58% of companies choose to freeze all new hires, especially large enterprise-level (75%) rather than SMEs (50 – 56% roughly). Other labor cost reduction initiatives include postponing salary, incentive & performance review (37%); canceling internship programs (28%); reducing working hours (26%); requiring unpaid leave temporarily (16.5%); suspending permanent contract extensions (12.46%). When making those decisions, 69% of companies collaborated or negotiated with their employees in advance rather than acted unilaterally.


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