Google CEO Sundar Pichai has hinted at further job cuts if the company does not become 20 per cent more efficient. This comes weeks after Google executives reportedly warned its employees to work harder or be prepared to leave as “there will be blood on the streets” if the next quarterly earnings are not as per expectations.
Pichai said that he hopes to make Google 20 per cent more efficient, as he tackles issues including economic challenges and rapid hirings over many years. Addressing the Code Conference in Los Angeles, Pichai shared details on how the company was planning to be more efficient amid economic uncertainty and a broader slowdown in ad spending, a CNBC report has said.
“The more we try to understand the macroeconomic, we feel very uncertain about it,” Pichai said on Tuesday, adding, “The macroeconomic performance is correlated to ad spend, consumer spend and so on.”
The Alphabet boss acknowledged that the company had become ‘slower’ after its headcount grew, while adding that macroeconomic factors were out of his control.
“We want to make sure as a company, when you have fewer resources than before, you are prioritising all the right things to be working on and your employees are really productive that they can actually have impact on the things they’re working on so that’s what we are spending our time on,” he said.
“Across everything we do, we can be slower to make decisions,” Pichai said at the event. “You look at it end-to-end and figure out how to make the company 20 per cent more productive,” he added.
Pichai drew specific examples on how he plans to carry this forward. He also cited examples of merging YouTube Music and Google Play Music into one product.
“Sometimes there are areas to make progress [where] you have three people making decisions, understanding that and bringing it down to two or one improves efficiency by 20 per cent,” he gave in another example.
In August, Google in a company mail told employees that there will be an “overall examination of sales productivity and productivity in general” and that if next quarter results “don’t look up, there will be blood on the streets.”
If third quarter results “don’t look up, [then] there will be blood on the streets,” according to a message conveyed to the sales team. The warning was first reported by Insider. The IT giant has now threatened its employees with layoffs if the profit expectations were not up fulfilled.
Pichai had in July told employees that they must improve productivity due to fierce economic headwinds. He said he wanted to get ideas from employees on to get “better results faster.”
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