Google employees pressed leadership about why managers weren’t informed before announcing layoffs of 12,000 workers

• Google started laying off 12,000 employees on Friday.
• Googlers pressed leadership at a town hall on Monday on why managers weren’t informed beforehand.
• Leadership responded that the company wanted to “give certainty sooner.”

Googlers want to know why managers were left in the dark about the layoffs of 12,000 employees that began on Friday. 

At an internal town-hall meeting on Monday, Google’s leadership addressed two questions about why managers weren’t informed about the mass layoffs and one question about the company’s communication strategy around the layoffs. 

Google laid off employees based on factors like the company’s highest priorities and the employees’ skill set, experience, productivity, and performance history, Google’s chief people officer, Fiona Cicconi, said at the meeting. About 750 leaders were involved in making decisions about the layoffs, but not every vice president was involved, Cicconi added. These decision-makers were responsible for product strategy and business.

“In an ideal world, we would have given managers a heads-up, but we have over 30,000 managers at Google,” Cicconi said on the call. 

Consulting with all of them would have taken “additional weeks,” Cicconi added, and the company wanted to “give certainty sooner.”

“What I want to end with is, this is primarily about removing roles that didn’t align with business priorities,” Cicconi said. 

Another question asked about how in a “perfect world,” managers would have been given a heads-up, but they weren’t informed due to a “tight timeline.” “Why was there a tight timeline?” the questioner asked.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai responded that the company wanted to communicate about the layoffs “as soon as possible” and give people “as much certainty as possible.” Employees outside the US who could be impacted by layoffs have not yet been informed because the company is adhering to local regulations, so Google is “committed to getting clarity in many of these countries as soon as possible,” Pichai said. 

One employee asked about the communication strategy, saying many employees did not know who else was impacted by layoffs. Google deliberately did not share a list of people impacted “based on a principle of respect for people’s privacy,” said Rick Osterloh, the senior vice president of devices and services. Instead, the company wanted to let people “share the information on their own terms,” he added.

“It’s very hard on everyone and definitely takes a lot of time to fully absorb what happened,” Osterloh said.

Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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