Sundar Pichai: Google’s chief executive officer Sundar Pichai defended 12,000 job cuts and told employees on Monday that the step was taken a bid to act decisively as the company’s growth slowed. While many employees in the US had received the termination letter, the process had begun in the other countries.
Additionally, Pichai said employees would get fewer bonuses for the year 2022.
Consulted Google founders
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google parent Alphabet Inc., addressed an internal meeting where he said he had consulted with the company’s founders and board in making the decision for 6% cuts.
“If you don’t act clearly and decisively and early, we can compound the problem and make it much worse,” Pichai said. “These are decisions I needed to make,” he added.
Google last week announced it would eliminate about 12,000 jobs, becoming the latest tech giant to retrench after years of abundant growth and hiring. Although speculation about the cuts had been doing rounds for months, the layoffs came as a shock for some employees. Some realized they were no more Google employees when they could not access corporate systems. Yet Pichai stressed the cuts were the product of careful consideration.
‘Significant reduction’ in annual bonuses
“The process was far from random,” he said. He added that because bonuses were tied to company performance, and because leadership needs to be accountable, all senior vice presidents and above would see a “significant reduction” in their annual bonus this year.
The size of Google’s workforce forced executives to keep the circle of decision makers relatively small, said Fiona Cicconi, Google’s chief people officer, in the meeting with employees.
“In an ideal world, we would have given managers a heads up, but we have over 30,000 managers at Google,” Cicconi said. “We wanted to give certainty sooner.”
Another executive said severance packages had been structured to reward workers with long tenures at the company.
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