In leaked audio, Google CEO says company could have handled layoffs better

Google CEO Sundar Pichai spoke internally about the company’s recent mass layoffs. The manager’s speech during the meeting was leaked and published on the website. Business Content.

According to the material, Pichai supports the measure affecting 12 thousand employees There are outages all over the world, including Brazil. Still, he recognizes that the company could have handled the situation better.

The CEO’s speech was in response to an employee question. The employee asked what impact the decision to lay off so many people had on the company in terms of growth, morale, profit and loss.

What does Google CEO say about layoffs?

According to Pichai, 12 thousand people were laid off “Major and significant impact on morale” of your employees. The topic was brought up frequently in feedback sessions and also at Googlegeist, the annual internal survey conducted with the team.

“This is difficult for any company to deal with. We’ve never had a moment like this in our 25 years as Google. (…) It’s clear that this wasn’t the right way to do it. I think there was something we could have done in a different way,” he explains.

The CEO also emphasized that the cuts were necessary, but said managers could have acted better in some cases. One of the failures was: Notify all employees at the same time, regardless of time zone or working hours. Additionally, termination of system access to terminated employees “This was a very, very difficult decision.”

“It turns out, obviously, If we hadn’t acted, it would have been a much worse decision later.. This would be a huge threat to the company. “I believe that in a year like this and at a time when there are such big changes in the world, it will be very difficult to create the capacity to invest in certain areas,” explained the CEO.

Pichai is likely talking about the new field of artificial intelligence as a new sector of great importance. One of the company’s latest innovations in this area is the Gemini language model, which should be one of the company’s focuses next year.