Less work, more employees: Sundar Pichai slams staff amid poor revenue

Google’s poor quarterly revenue in Q2 for FY22 has pushed its CEO Sundar Pichai to admonish employees to buck up and work more efficiently.

The tech giant recently announced that its earnings in the second quarter of 2022 was 13 per cent less than that recorded during the same period last year, and “weaker than expected.”

Reports said, after the revenue was announced Pichai called a meeting where he told employees to work efficiently and focus more on ways to improve their products and help customers.

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The Google boss was reportedly felt that the productivity was missing among employees and there was less work vis a vis the huge workforce the company has.

A report in CNBC said that Pichai asked employees to “create a culture that is more mission-focused, more focused on our products, more customer focused. We should think about how we can minimize distractions and really raise the bar on both product excellence and productivity.”

It is being reported that the company may consider layoffs in the next quarter, not just over lack of efficiency, productivity and skills, but also to cut costs. Google had recently announced that it would review its headcount needs and “align on a new set of prioritised staffing requests for the next three months.”

Before that the company had announced that it would lower the frequency of recruitment for the rest of the year.

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Pichai’s warning is reminiscent of a similar statement made by Meta’s founder Mark Zuckerberg. He had not only said that the company has employees who shouldn’t be there in the first place, but also asked people to leave if they aren’t comfortable with the work system. Facebook has also freezed hiring amid a looming recession.