Google employees were in a frenzy one year ago when the company decided to suddenly lay off 12,000 staff members, which turned out to be the biggest ever layoff in the history of the company. CEO Sundar Pichai has now opened up on the specifics of the job cuts.
During an all-hands company meeting at Google, some employees raised their concerns regarding the massive layoff that took place in 2022, where CEO Sundar Pichai reportedly “defended” the decision to cut 6 percent of the jobs in the company.
“That was clear at Google’s latest all-hands meeting on Tuesday (December 12), where CEO Sundar Pichai defended the decision to cut 6% of the company’s workforce,” said a Business Insider report, quoting an audio obtained from the meeting.
An employee asked Pichai during the meeting, “It has been almost 1 year since we made the difficult decision to reduce our workforce. What impact did this decision have on our growth, P&L, and morale?”
The Google CEO responded by saying that there has been a big impact on the morale of the employees, terming it as one of the “most difficult decisions for the company”. He said, “At Google, we really haven’t had a moment quite like that in 25 years.”
Terming the decision as “difficult but necessary”, Pichai said that if the company hadn’t cut those jobs last year, it would have been “a worse decision down the line.”
“It would have been a major overhang on the company. I think it would have made it very difficult in a year like this with such a big shift in the world to create the capacity to invest in areas,” the Google CEO said.
Sundar Pichai’s take on cutting immediate access
While Pichai defended the decision to cut 12,000 jobs in Google, he said that it was a “bad idea” to cut the immediate access of all the laid-off personnel and to inform all the fired employees at the same time, regardless of the time zone.
“Clearly, it’s not the right way to do it. I think it’s something we could have done differently for sure,” Pichai said.
