Be careful to be laid off at the end of the year Internet companies "eliminated at the end" truth love operations

Be careful to be laid off at the end of the year Internet companies "eliminated at the end of the year"

Lu Yifu, Special Correspondent of Time Weekly, from Guangzhou

On the last day of 2015, Huang Ying kept her job - after the communication between her boss and all the employees of the department, she finally decided to lay off two new employees who had been recruited by the company for less than half a year.

Huang Ying is not unfamiliar with such a decision. A large enterprise in her country Internet companies Every year“ Last place elimination ”- The company will sort employees according to their appraisal results, and the employees at the bottom will be eliminated. As Huang Ying's company did not really implement the assessment system, the "last elimination" became the apportionment index of each department, which was forced by 10% Layoff 。

This scenario is repeated in large Internet companies every year. In China, Ren Zhengfei, CEO of Huawei, was the first to implement the "last to be eliminated". At the peak of Huawei in 2000, Ren Zhengfei reminded Huawei people to be prepared for danger in times of peace with an internal letter "Huawei Winter", which opened the prelude to the "last to be eliminated"; In 2012, Baidu Li Yanhong sent an internal open letter of "Change starts with you and me", demanding "to encourage wolves and eliminate petty bourgeoisie", and advocating self subversion. Since then, how to inject "wolf nature" into enterprises has become a learning direction for domestic Internet enterprise managers.

But is "the last elimination" the best way to maintain the competitiveness of enterprises? There are still many controversies on this issue. A person engaged in human resources management told the Times that "elimination of the last" is no longer an advanced management method. Instead of regular large-scale layoffs every year, it is better to set a high threshold in recruitment to avoid harm to the long-term construction of the enterprise.

Meizu's sudden layoff

Meizu successfully won the first IT headlines in 2016 because of the "last elimination".

On January 4, Meizu issued a public statement that Meizu will optimize its staff every year from January 1 this year, and the proportion of layoffs this time will not exceed 5%. Meizu's reason is to "optimize the organizational structure in a timely manner. Only by taking this step can Meizu be built into a modern enterprise with efficient operation".

Bai Yongxiang, the president of Meizu, said in an internal letter that Meizu's staff size had grown to nearly 4000, and building an excellent team had become a key issue to consider. Jack Welch's 2-7-1 theory is to eliminate the bottom 10% of people every year.

For eliminated employees, the statement also said: "For employees who have become regular employees, the company will pay an additional month's salary as year-end compensation, plus 2N+1's severance compensation (N is the number of years of work in Meizu); for employees who are in probation or internship, the company will pay one month's salary as year-end compensation."

The news of "layoff" came suddenly, because 2015 was the fastest growing year since Meizu was founded. Earlier, Meizu announced that its total sales in 2015 exceeded 20 million units, with a year-on-year growth of 350%. At the same time, Meizu also announced its sales target of 25 million units in 2016, but the year-on-year growth rate was only 25%.

This is regarded as Meizu's intention to control costs and prepare for the upcoming financing and IPO. According to the data disclosed by Bai Yongxiang in September 2014, Meizu had 1500 employees at that time, but now it has 4000 employees, 75% of whom are new employees within one year, which is also the main part of layoffs. This means that the seemingly generous compensation in the statement actually does not satisfy these Meizu employees.

Although the sales volume exceeded 20 million units, Meizu mainly relied on low-end thousand yuan machines, and the sales volume of high-end models was not ideal. As we all know, in order to improve the profit margin, breaking through the middle and high end is one aspect, while controlling the sales of middle and low end products with low profit margin is another aspect. This may be one of the main reasons why Meizu has reduced the sales growth this year.

Meizu released 6 models in 2015, adding the mobile phone brand to three sub brands: MX, Meilan and PRO, and the company's employees naturally increased significantly. The expanded product line and the exploding workload put forward higher requirements for Meizu's personnel. Many internal employees of Meizu have told the interface news reporter that since 2014, Meizu has strengthened the number of personnel in product, market and other departments, of which the number of people in the market department has reached nearly 200, half of whom joined during 2014-2015.

Meizu market Marketing Wan Zhiqiang, the director of the department, said publicly that unlike many companies that rely on external brain and agency companies, most of Meizu marketing management They should be completed by themselves. Meizu Marketing Center should be able to execute an advertisement completely independently case 。

Li Nan, Vice President of Meizu, said that Meizu's layoff was mainly to make room for the introduction of high-quality talents. "Next year, our staff will grow". It is reported that Meizu will introduce talents including the Internet operate , offline channels and overseas markets.

Internet companies are ubiquitous

For Meizu employees who may be laid off, this notice is obviously not good news. Many Meizu employees believe that this "elimination" reflects the confusion of human resources management in Meizu's rapid expansion process, and the "elimination of the last" is suspected of "disguised layoffs". In addition, the layoff occurred at a sensitive time point like the beginning of the year, which coincided with the implementation of a series of benefits such as year-end performance appraisal and salary increase. Compared with year-end benefits and salary increase, the company's severance compensation is just a "comfort award".

In fact, Meizu is just one of the Internet companies that adopts "last elimination". In China, "last elimination" is very popular among enterprises, especially Internet companies. According to the statistics of Time Weekly, Huawei Ali 、 tencent As well as Didi and other IT giants have the tradition of using the "last elimination". In Ren Zhengfei's Internal Speech, Ren Zhengfei believes that Huawei has always adopted the last place elimination system.

"The last elimination system is never stopped. Only by eliminating the poor employees can the entire organization be activated." Ren Zhengfei said that he might be eliminated for the company's sake. "Huawei is determined to eliminate the 'sandwich class'. This is what I learned from Apple The company learned a painful lesson. "

Cheng Wei, the founder of Didi, has the same view. He stopped Didi's recruitment and said that he would "eliminate the last one" to make the company stronger in execution and morale. "I still want the team to clench their fists a little bit. Too many team members will dilute their executive power. These are all for running faster in the future," Cheng Wei said.

Improve the wolf nature of enterprises?

The predecessor of the "last elimination" is the "vitality curve", which was first proposed by the United States GE Jack Welch, CEO of the company. He believed that the company should divide its employees into different categories and treat them differently, which was considered as one of the magic weapons to bring infinite vitality to GE.

After the introduction of Jack Welch's Autobiography into China in 2010, the "last elimination" has also become popular among Internet companies, and now it has gradually expanded to more fields, such as logistics enterprises. At the end of last year, Shunfeng was exposed to large-scale layoffs in five business groups. In response, Shunfeng said: "This is the company's elimination at the end of the year based on business assessment and evaluation, and does not involve front-line employees. It is hoped that in the rapid development of the company, employees will be reminded to strengthen self cultivation, keep up with the thinking of enterprise change, and keep up with the pace."

Many enterprise managers believe that the implementation of "elimination of the last" can help to maintain the combat effectiveness of enterprises, especially for Internet companies that pay attention to "wolf nature". In 2012, an internal letter from Baidu CEO Robin Li attracted wide attention, in which Robin Li expressed his concern about Baidu's current situation and put forward the statement of "encouraging wolves and eliminating petty bourgeoisie", which was regarded as a signal that Baidu was going to catch up with the wave of mobile Internet at that time. "To eliminate petty bourgeoisie is to call for the wolf nature, and to call for the wolf nature is to add carrots and sticks. To make all employees more clear, if you want to find a stable job and live without merit, please leave now, or our big ship will be dragged down."

However, Robin Li's idea has attracted widespread criticism, because overemphasizing "wolf nature" will only increase employees' sense of fatigue and suppress human nature. Many Internet practitioners said that Internet innovation really needs pressure, but adopting the last elimination and other methods is not the fundamental way to maintain the competitiveness of enterprises - the biggest irrationality of the last elimination system lies in the development of rigid elimination rate indicators, which is likely to sacrifice young employees to complete the target tasks in the specific implementation, This is likely to kill some potential and even excellent employees by mistake.

Some people engaged in human resources management told the Times that "elimination of the last" is no longer an advanced management method. "Theoretically, 'elimination of the last' can indeed keep the enterprise wolf; but in the long run, it will greatly damage the cultural construction of the enterprise. Under the normal operation of the enterprise, large-scale layoffs can only be done occasionally, not as a long-term strategy."