Sundar Pichai, CEO, Alphabet
Lluis Gene | AFP | Getty Images
Days after Google announced the most important round of layoffs in the corporate’s 25-year history, executives defended the job cuts and took questions from a concerned workforce during a town hall meeting on Monday.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai led the companywide meeting and told employees that executives will see their bonuses cut. He pleaded with staffers to stay motivated as Google faces heightened competition in areas like artificial intelligence, while also trying to elucidate why employees who lost their jobs were faraway from the interior system unexpectedly.
“I understand you might be apprehensive about what comes next to your work,” Pichai said. “Also very sad for the lack of some really good colleagues across the corporate. For those of you outside the U.S., the delay in with the ability to make and communicate decisions about roles in your region is undoubtedly causing anxiety.”
CNBC listened to audio of the meeting, which followed the corporate’s announcement Friday that it’s eliminating 12,000 jobs, or roughly 6% of the full-time workforce. While employees had been bracing for a possible layoff, they wanted answers regarding the factors that was used to find out who would stay and who would go. Among the laid-off staffers had long tenures and were recently promoted.
Pichai opened Monday’s town hall meeting acknowledging the Lunar Latest 12 months mass shooting in Southern California Saturday night that killed 11 people and injured no less than nine others.
“A lot of us are still grappling with the violence in L.A. over the weekend and the tragic loss in life,” Pichai said. “I do know more details are yet to return out, nevertheless it’s definitely hit our Asian-American community in a deep way, especially in the course of the moment of Lunar Latest 12 months and we’re all considering of them.”
‘We’ve over 30,000 managers’
After moving the conversation to job cuts, Pichai offered some explanation for a way he and the chief team made its decisions.
Pichai said he consulted with the founders and controlling shareholders Sergey Brin and Larry Page in addition to the board of directors.
Pichai said 2021 marked “one in all the strongest years we’ve ever had within the history of the corporate,” with 41% revenue growth. Google expanded headcount to match that expansion, and Pichai said the corporate was assuming growth would persist.
“In that context, we made a set of choices that may need been right if the trends continued,” he said. “You’ve gotten to recollect if the trend had continued and we had not hired to maintain pace, we might fall behind in lots of areas as an organization.”
Google and Alphabet finance chief Ruth Porat responded to some worker questions in Monday’s town hall that addressed its recent layoff.
Executives said 750 senior leaders were involved in the method, adding that it took a number of weeks to find out who could be laid off.
“We’ve over 30,000 managers at Google and to seek the advice of with all of them would have made this an open process where it might have taken additional weeks and even months to make a decision,” said Fiona Cicconi, Google’s chief people officer, on the meeting. “We desired to get certainty sooner.”
Regarding the factors for cuts, Cicconi said execs checked out areas where the work was vital, but the corporate had too many individuals in addition to places where the work itself wasn’t critical. Cicconi said the corporate considered “skill set, time in role where experience or relationships are relevant and matter, productivity indicators like sales quotas and performance history.”
Pichai indicated there could be executive compensation cuts but provided limited details. He said all senior vice presidents “will see a really significant reduction of their annual bonus” this 12 months.
“The more senior you might be, the more your compensation is tied to performance,” he said. “You may reduce your equity grants if performance shouldn’t be great.”
Prior to the job cuts, Google had made the choice to pay out 80% of bonuses this month with the remainder expected in March or April. In prior years, the complete bonus was paid in January.
Thomas Kurian, the CEO of Google Cloud, offered some perspective on the areas that saw cuts. Google’s cloud unit has been one in all the fastest-growing areas for headcount expansion as the corporate tries to catch Amazon and Microsoft.
“Our engineering hiring is being way more targeted in areas where we’d like to fill out a product portfolio,” Kurian said. “We’re adding sales and customer engineers in very specific countries and industries.”
Kurian said that starting in July, the cloud unit’s aim was to focus hiring “in response to generative AI across our portfolio.”
Like with other all-hands meetings, Google executives took questions from the corporate’s internal forum called Dory. Employees can post questions there, they usually bubble as much as the highest when their co-workers give them an upvote.
For Monday’s meeting, a few of the top-rated questions needed to do with the method and communication across the layoffs. One comment said that employees are “playing a game of ping-and-hope-to-hear-back to determine who lost their job. Are you able to speak to the communication strategy?”
Rick Osterloh, senior vp of devices and services, said the corporate “deliberately didn’t share out of respect for people’s privacy.”
“We all know this could be frustrating for people who find themselves still here,” Osterloh said. “But losing your job with none alternative in it is extremely difficult and it’s very personal and lots of people don’t want their names to be on an inventory that’s distributed to everyone.”
Waiting for A.I.
One other commenter on Dory wrote, “We severed access for 12k employees without the prospect to perform knowledge transfers and even allow them to say goodbye to their colleagues. That is what we do to individuals who get fired.”
Then got here the query: “What’s the message for those of us who’re left?”
Royal Hansen, vp of Security at Google, chimed in to explain “an unusual set of risks that frankly we’re not that well-practiced at managing.” He said there have been “tradeoffs.”
“When you concentrate on our users and the way critical they’ve develop into in people’s lives — all of the services, the sensitive data they’ve trusted us with — though it may need been a really low likelihood, we needed to plan for the likelihood that something could go terribly improper,” Hansen said. “The very best option was to shut corporate access the way in which you described,” he said, referring to the abrupt shutdown.
In response to an issue asking how employees who had been with the corporate for 15-plus years were targeted for cuts, Brian Glaser, vp and chief talent and learning officer said, “everyone knows that nobody is proof against change in our careers.”
Pichai reminded staffers that the corporate has essential work ahead, particularly with respect to rapid progress in AI. Last month, Google employees asked executives at an all-hands meeting whether the AI chatbot ChatGPT represents a “missed opportunity” for Google.”
Pichai said on Monday that “it can be a vital 12 months given the rapid advancements in AI,” which could have an impact across the corporate.
“There is a paradigm shift with AI and I feel, with the concentration of talent we have now and work we are going to do here, can be an enormous draw and I hope it can proceed to be,” Pichai added. “We’ve to maintain earning it.”
He closed the town hall by bringing the discussion back to the subject at hand.
It’s evident, Pichai said, “how much you all care about your colleagues and the corporate.” He added, “I do know it can take loads more time to process this moment and what you heard today as well.”
WATCH: Google becoming leaner