(Bloomberg) — Google’s chief executive told employees on Monday that the job cuts were designed to act decisively as the company’s growth slows.
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During an internal meeting, Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google’s parent company, Alphabet Inc., said he consulted with the founders and the company’s board of directors to come up with a proposal. decided to cut 6%, according to Bloomberg’s comment.
“If you don’t act clearly, decisively and early on, we can complicate matters further and make it much worse,” Pichai said. “These are the decisions I need to make.”
Google said on Friday that it would eliminate about 12,000 jobs, becoming the latest tech giant to cut after years of growth and ample hiring. Although speculation about the cuts has swirled for months, the layoffs are still a shock to the system for some employees. Some realized they lost their jobs when they couldn’t access the company’s systems. Still, Pichai stressed the cuts were the product of careful deliberation.
This process is not random, he said.
Fiona Cicconi, Google’s chief human resources officer, said the size of Google’s workforce forces executives to keep the group of decision-makers relatively small.
“In an ideal world, we would warn managers, but we have more than 30,000 managers at Google,” says Cicconi. “We wanted to give certainty sooner.”
Another executive said severance packages have been structured to reward employees who have worked at the company for a long time.
Alphabet’s chief financial officer, Ruth Porat, stressed during the meeting that the cuts were meant to give the company more time to continue investing in key priorities.
“Act early and then you create the ability to invest for long-term growth,” says Porat. “Difficult like this, those are the takeaways.”
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