This year, some of the Big Tech companies like Twitter, Meta, and Amazon laid off thousands of employees globally. In the upcoming year, Google is said to lay off more than 10000 employees and the company has already started evaluating the performance of employees across verticals. Google employees, though, aren’t very happy. Of course.
The tech giant has developed a performance management system called Google Reviews and Development (GRAD), which will help managers identify employees with the worst performance. The company is expected to start the evaluation process in the first half of next year, the specific timeline hasn’t been revealed by the company yet. But employees at Google are already concerned about the company’s new employee evaluation system.
Read More: 10 big IPOs to watch in 2023: Foxconn’s Bharat FIH, Sachin Bansal-backed Navi Technologies & more
According to a fresh report coming from the New York Times (NYT) Google employees in Switzerland have sent a letter to the company’s vice president of human resources stating their worries. In the letter, Google employees stated that “at least some managers were aggressively pressured to apply a quota” in the employee evaluation process. In the letter, Google employees also mentioned that the quota allotment could lead to negative ratings and eventually lead to job cuts in the future. The NYT report also stated that some Google employees are interpreting the recent changes in performance management as a warning that the company may be planning broader layoffs.
Google has been making some cost-saving decisions lately, starting from the shutting down of a small office to the cancellation of a content moderation project and also reducing budgets during 2023 planning meetings. Some media reports circulating on the internet suggest that Google may fire as much as 6 per cent of the total workforce, expected to score low in the new performance management system. While Google hasn’t officially revealed details about its upcoming layoffs, some reports suggest that the company may fire as many as 10,000 employees.
Read More: Ex-ICICI Bank CEO Chanda Kochhar, Husband Deepak Kochhar Sent to Judicial Custody Till Jan 10
Time and again, CEO Sundar Pichai also warned employees to be more productive and also expressed his disappointment about employees not working hard enough. “There are real concerns that our productivity as a whole is not where it needs to be for the headcount we have.[We need to] create a culture that is more mission-focused, more focused on our products, more customer-focused. We should think about how we can minimize distractions and really raise the bar on both product excellence and productivity,” Pichai said during an all-hands meeting earlier this year.
During another recently held all-hands meeting, Google CEO hinted at layoffs once again and told employees that it’s “tough to predict the future”. He also added that he cannot make “forward-looking commitments” about the same.
