The CEO of Google rules out possible layoffs, but warns: the productivity of his employees must improve

No less than 174,000 people work at Alphabet, but maintaining that workforce is not easy or cheap, and less so in such difficult times. Sundar Pichai and his human resources team made it clear a few days ago, when they spoke about this situation and launched a new campaign to try to reactivate their employees.

Simplicity sprint. This is the name of the new effort proposed by the CEO of Google, an initiative that according to CNBC will collect ideas from all your staff to try to better understand where Google should focus and where it would be possible to improve the efficiency of its workers. This idea tries to alleviate tensions after that ‘Googlegeist’ that showed how part of Google employees felt underpaid and poorly promoted.

Help me to help you. Employees will be able to share those ideas until August 15 through an internal survey. It asks questions that try to find out how you could work more efficiently and what obstacles should be removed to achieve it. It is even aimed at employees detecting areas of business that may not be so necessary.

care. The CEO of Google indicated in a meeting with his employees that the productivity of Google as a company was not at the point where he needed to be even with his huge staff. Or what is the same: his workers (in general terms) do not seem to be fulfilling the objectives that he expected.

And there’s no bun oven. At the conference for investors after presenting resultsPichai explained that “it is clear that we are facing a very demanding macroeconomic environment and with a lot of uncertainty ahead”.

The company had revenues that grew 13% compared to the same quarter of the previous year, when in 2021 that growth was a (spectacular) 62% thanks in large part to the pandemic and the increase in consumer spending.

Productivity and clear focus. Pichai believes that to get out of this it’s a good idea to ask your employees what it takes to “create a culture that’s more focused on goals, on our products, on the customer. We should be thinking about how to minimize distractions and raise the bar both as far as productivity as well as excellence in our products”.

No layoffs, but no (many) hires. Google has already made it clear that it was going to pause new hires — like many other companies — but this seemed to indicate a potential prelude to a layoff plan. Fiona Cicconi, the person in charge of human resources, explained that the company does not currently have redundancy plans, but she did not completely rule out that option either. “While we can’t be sure what the economy will be like in the future, we’re not looking at reducing Google’s global workforce at this time.”