Thousands of people were laid off by Big Tech firms this year, including Twitter, Meta, and Amazon. Google is expected to fire off around 10,000 employees in the coming year, and the corporation has already begun analyzing employee performance across sectors. Google employees, on the other hand, are dissatisfied. Without a doubt.
Google has created a performance management system called Google Reviews and Development (GRAD) that will assist managers in identifying employees who are doing poorly. The corporation expects to begin the review process in the first part of next year, though no exact schedule has been provided. However, Google employees are already apprehensive about the company’s new employee rating system.
According to a new story from the New York Times (NYT), Google employees in Switzerland have written to the company’s vice president of human resources to express their concerns. According to the letter, “at least some managers were aggressively pressured to apply a quota” in the employee appraisal process. Google workers also warned in the letter that the quota allotment might lead to unfavorable evaluations and, potentially, job layoffs in the future. According to the NYT story, some Google employees are misinterpreting recent changes in performance management as a sign that the business is considering more layoffs.
Google has recently made various cost-cutting measures, including the closure of a tiny office, the abandonment of a content moderation project, and the reduction of budgets during 2023 planning sessions. According to certain media stories circulating on the internet, Google may dismiss up to 6% of its overall employees if they score poorly in the new performance monitoring system. While Google hasn’t officially announced any specifics regarding its forthcoming layoffs, several sources indicate that the corporation might dismiss up to 10,000 employees.
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, has often admonished staff to be more productive and voiced his unhappiness with employees who do not work 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 stated earlier this year at an all-hands meeting.
During another recently conducted all-hands meeting, Google CEO hinted about layoffs once again and reminded staff that it’s “difficult to foresee the future”. He also stated that he is unable to make “forward-looking pledges” about the same
