Explaining cost-cutting by the tech giant, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said the company is being “a bit more responsible through one of the toughest macroeconomic conditions underway in the past decade”. He added that the company needs to take a long-term view through conditions like this.
He said this while addressing questions of employees at an all-hands meeting this week, according to a CNBC report. Pichai faced tough questions from employees on issues including cutting on travel and entertainment budgets, managing productivity and potential layoffs, the report said.
On the expenditure cuts related to travel and entertainment, Pichai told employees, “I hope all of you are reading the news, externally. The fact that you know, we are being a bit more responsible through one of the toughest macroeconomic conditions underway in the past decade, I think it’s important that as a company, we pull together to get through moments like this.”
He also said, “I remember when Google was small and scrappy. Fun didn’t always — we shouldn’t always equate fun with money. I think you can walk into a hard-working startup and people may be having fun and it shouldn’t always equate to money.”
Pichai also said he does understand some of the travel restrictions at a time like this and RTO and people wanting to see each other, definitely is not ideal.
“If you haven’t seen your team in a while and it’ll help your work by getting together in person, I think you can do that. I think that’s why we are not saying no to travel, we are giving discretion to teams,” he said, according to the report.
On managing productivity, Pichai told employees, “I think you could be a 20-person team or a 100-person team, we are going to be constrained in our growth in a looking-ahead basis… Maybe you were planning on hiring six more people but maybe you are going to have to do with four and how are you going to make that happen? The answers are going to be different with different teams.”, according to the CNBC report.
He said that sometimes during the product launch process, over many years, it becomes more complicated than maybe it needs to be.
“Can we look at that process and maybe remove two steps and that’ll be an example of making something 20 per cent more efficient? I think all of us chipping in and doing that across all levels, I think can help the company. At our scale, there is no way we can solve that unless units of teams of all sizes do better,” the report quoted Pichai as saying.
On the potential job cuts, the Google CEO said that telling the entire workforce of cuts is “not a scaleable way to do it” but he said he will “try and notify the company of the more important updates”.
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