Laidoffs not desirable, says Axilor Ventures chairman
Axilor Ventures chairman Kris Gopalakrishnan said on Thursday that layoffs are not desirable, but they are not possible in a high-growth industry like IT. Infosys co-founder and Axilor Ventures chairman Kris Gopalakrishnan said in Mumbai on Thursday amid tech companies letting go of employees in droves over the past year due to global headwinds.
He said that the IT industr employs 5,00, 000 people and has been adding employees on a net basis for the past 40 years.
Today, the IT industry employs 5 lakh people and hires around 2 lakh people every year. Why is it that 1.5 lakh people are being laid off? He said at the Great Place To Work FOR ALL Summit that we have to look at how to help them and do it in a humane way.
More than 2,00, 000 employees have been laid off since 2022, according to tech layoff tracker Layoffs.fyi. A long list of tech giants, such as Facebook, Google, Amazon and Microsoft, account for a chunk of the losses, due to an imminent recession in the US. The cascading effect means that several thousands of tech employees in India have been affected, across startups and legacy organisations.
The situation in India is expected to be bad for a few months at least. Job growth in the Indian IT sector has declined by 25% over the last year, according to the most recent Naukri hiring index for January 2023. Fresher hiring faced the biggest slump, as well as a mid-experience hiring decline, as the hiring intent declined across both large IT giants and unicorns.
Gopalakrishnan said that the longevity of organisations is the best measure of an organisation's success, making it crucial for the organisation and society to survive.
He said that it is important to look at the reasons for the layoffs from an organisation perspective. If the company board or CEO decides to reduce 10% of expenses, the easiest way to do it is to cut 10% of the workforce and you immediately meet your goal. It is mechanical and indiscriminate and could cause damage far beyond what you expect. If the layoffs are necessitated by changes and if you do it in a humane way, it is not desirable, but it cannot be avoided. He pointed out that it can be done in a humane way by retraining the laid off employee, helping them find other opportunities, building for these requirements into the financial plans. Don t set wrong expectations by saying your job is life The leadership needs to behave properly and take the larger pay cuts so as to retain some people From an employee perspective, addressing the negative sentiment about job security today, he said : "You can't say anything, whatever you do, I must be employed. It won't work in today s competitive world. These things have to be handled humanely and minimise the harm we are causing. Laid-off employees have been taking to social media to talk about the ways in which their employers have fired them.