HR Consultation Singapore

Consultation produces advice and documents. We look at what you have, benchmark it, draft what needs drafting, and hand it over. Your HR team takes it from there.

HR Shared Services is the opposite arrangement. We run the function month to month: payroll, CPF and SDL submissions, IR8A and IR21 filings, the employee lifecycle, work pass administration. Nothing gets handed back, because nothing was handed over.

Most employers who call us want the first one, because they already have an HR function and a specific question. The delivery question, if it comes at all, tends to come later.

Four structures, and which one fits is usually obvious once we understand what the work actually involves.

Fixed fee on a defined scope is the common case. The engagement letter says what is being done, a handbook revision or a benchmarking exercise for your senior bands, and the fee covers delivering it. This works when the boundaries are clear.

A monthly retainer suits employers who want a senior HR view available continuously rather than in bursts. It covers advisory access, periodic pieces of work, and someone to call before a decision rather than after it. Mid-sized Singapore employers without a senior HR head in house tend to land here.

A day rate covers work too variable to price up front: multi-phase programmes, restructuring support, anything where the findings keep changing the scope.

Custom quoting applies when the complexity itself is the issue, for example a multi-country programme, or an integration where confidentiality is the binding constraint.

Whichever applies, the fee is written into the engagement letter before any diagnostic work starts.

It depends what is being built, and the ranges below are estimates rather than commitments.

An HR health check or gap diagnostic is typically three to five weeks from the scoping conversation to a findings report, assuming documents arrive promptly.

A handbook rewrite generally runs four to eight weeks. What moves that number is how much usable material already exists and how many policies need drafting from nothing.

Benchmarking and a pay structure rebuild is the slowest of them, roughly six to ten weeks end to end, because gathering comparable Singapore data takes time and the bands have to be modelled against your actual payroll before anyone signs off.

Retainers are ongoing and usually reviewed at six or twelve months.

We do not commit to a completion date at the outset. Almost every engagement has a discovery phase, and discovery routinely surfaces work nobody knew was there. Where that happens the engagement letter is updated rather than quietly stretched.

Audits surface exactly the things an employer would rather not see written down: policy gaps, compliance exposure, pay discrepancies, employee relations risk. C&B work involves salary data and proposed restructuring that is commercially sensitive by definition.

So an NDA is in place before any document changes hands. Findings, salary data, equity analyses and gap reports go only to the stakeholders named in the engagement letter. We do not use engagement specifics in marketing and we do not discuss them with other clients.

Where confidentiality is heightened, a transaction that is not yet public or separations still being contemplated, we add handling protocols: a restricted internal team, secure document exchange, and code naming where it helps.

Material your team can use, not strategy decks. What arrives depends on what was scoped.

Audit engagements produce a findings report with severity-rated gaps, a remediation plan ordered by risk with effort estimates, and a briefing deck for your executive team or board.

Handbook engagements produce the revised handbook, in your existing format or drafted fresh, policy commentary explaining the reasoning behind each change, and a rollout communications plan.

C&B engagements produce a benchmarking report with sector and role-level Singapore market data, an internal equity analysis, a recommended banding structure with its methodology documented, benefits recommendations, and a phased sequencing plan for moving from the old structure to the new one.

The test we apply to every deliverable is whether your HR team could defend it to leadership without us in the room.

Yes, though it is scoped separately once the advisory work is finished. Three patterns cover most of it.

Short implementation assistance on a day rate or a small project fee: communications support for a handbook launch, coordinating a band rollout across teams, training your HR team on what changed.

Conversion to a retainer, which is common where a project engagement ends and the client wants continued access through the rollout, plus periodic check-ins on how it is landing.

Or a move to HR Shared Services, where the advisory work has made clear that running the function in house is no longer the right answer. Documentation from the advisory engagement makes that onboarding considerably faster.