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It seems that the global economy has ushered in a new stage of "headwind", and many companies have made rapid adjustments to meet many unknown challenges, including technology giant Google.

"I really want your help," Google CEO sandar Pichai told employees at a plenary meeting on Wednesday, CNBC reported.

At the same time, Google also launched a program called "simplicity sprint" to collect their ideas on how to concentrate and improve efficiency from its 174000 internal employees, so that internal employees can the final say to see how everyone's work enthusiasm can be mobilized.

Poor performance, slow recruitment, and Google's crisis

In fact, as early as early July, Google's parent company, alphabet, announced, "due to the recruitment progress made so far, we will slow down the pace of recruitment and investment before 2023."

At that time, Pichai said in an internal letter to employees, "like all companies, we can't survive the economic headwind. We need to work with a stronger sense of urgency, sharper attention and higher enthusiasm, instead of always acting as we do on sunny days."

Google said it was helpless to choose to do so.

According to the second quarter performance report disclosed by alphabet, the revenue growth in the quarter slowed to 13% from 62% a year ago. Google's search and other revenue was $40.69 billion, up from $35.85 billion last year. Other business departments of alphabet, such as waymo, the autonomous vehicle department, and the venture capital departments of some health technology projects and companies, increased their revenue by $1million to $193million in the same period. But it lost $1.69 billion in the quarter.

At the same time, Google's cloud computing division's revenue did not meet expectations, with a loss of $858million in the quarter. In the cloud computing market, Google cloud department is trying to take a share from Amazon and Microsoft azure. However, in reality, it is not so easy.

Google launched the "simplicity sprint" program

It is reported that in the past year, the number of full-time employees of alphabet increased by 21% from 144056 in the previous year to 174014 today.

Faced with the sluggish market and the internal slowdown in recruitment, many employees are worried about layoffs. Therefore, Google launched a plan called "simplicity sprint" to accelerate product development with crowdsourcing ideas.

At the plenary meeting, Pichai said, "it is clear that we are facing a challenging macro environment with more uncertainties in the future." At the same time, "what is really worrying is that our overall productivity has not reached the level required by the number of employees we have."

This also means that although Google has a large number of employees, its productivity has not kept up. In order to solve this problem, Pichai expressed his hope to create a corporate culture that "pays more attention to tasks, products and customers", while eliminating interference to improve product excellence and productivity.

For developers, the word sprint in the "simplicity sprint" plan is not unfamiliar. In agile development, sprint refers to the short and fixed cycle required by the scrum team to complete a certain amount of work. It is also the core of Scrum and agile, which is also the core of this "simple sprint".

Pichai said that Google will collect employees' ideas on more effective product development through an internal survey before August 15. Among them, the questions investigated include:

What can help you serve our users and customers with higher clarity and efficiency?

Where should we remove obstacles to achieve better results faster?

As we grow, how can we avoid wasting time and maintain entrepreneurship and focus?

Although it seems to be a simple survey, Pichai said it is an effort to achieve better results in a shorter time.

Change the assessment mechanism

At the same time, the survey is also conducive to easing the tense relationship between Google employees and executives. Previously, an annual "googlegeist" survey report launched by Google showed that its employees also expressed their dissatisfaction after giving the company a particularly poor score in terms of salary, promotion and execution.

At that time, only 46% of the respondents said that their total salary was competitive compared with similar jobs in other companies, and this proportion decreased by 12% compared with a year ago. 56% said their salary was "fair and equitable", which was also 8% lower than the previous year. About 64% of employees said that their performance was reflected in their compensation, which decreased by 3%.

Overall, the satisfaction is far lower than that of the previous year. To this end, Prabhakar Raghavan, Google's senior executive in charge of key businesses such as search, advertising and commerce, stressed that his view of Google's executive power had decreased by 7%. He pointed out in an internal email: "this means that we need to pay more attention to undermining bureaucracy and ensure that we can act quickly when necessary."

In response to the dissatisfaction of internal employees, as early as may this year, Google also quickly made changes. It announced that it would thoroughly reform its performance evaluation process, abandon the twice yearly OKR evaluation, and adopt the once-a-year grad (Google reviews and development) mechanism. According to a person familiar with the matter, "under this new process, we expect most Google employees to receive higher salaries than the old perf system, and the total amount paid will also increase."

"No layoffs", but the team should "be more focused and efficient"

However, what Google has done can only alleviate anxiety, not avoid it. At the plenary meeting on Wednesday, a question became the hottest topic for employees to talk about - "in view of Sundar's statement that strengthening Google's focus' means integrating investment overlaps and simplifying processes', should we expect layoffs?"

Pichai gave this question to Fiona cicconi, Google's chief personnel officer, to answer. Cicconi said that the company is still recruiting and has no layoff plan at present, but she did not rule out this possibility.

"We require the team to be more focused and efficient, and we are also studying what this means for the company. Although we are not sure about the future economic situation, we do not plan to reduce the overall workforce of Google at present."

She also said, "based on the information we have heard from other companies and what they are doing, I really understand some of your anxiety about this. As Sundar said, we are still recruiting for key positions. You should remember that this is still the largest year in the history of the company."

Technology giants in the same situation

In addition to Google, another American technology giant meta (formerly Facebook) issued the same warning. Meta CEO Zuckerberg urged executives to improve their work speed and execution while conveying the information about reform to them. In addition, the human resources director of meta also issued a memo showing that meta plans to operate with "higher intensity". Under this, the company has raised higher and higher expectations for employees, so low-performance employees are ready to be eliminated.

At the same time, not long ago, Tesla CEO musk also sent an internal email to remind employees that everyone at Tesla must work in the office for at least 40 hours a week; Apple announced that it would slow the recruitment of some businesses and reduce spending next year to cope with the potential economic recession.

Under this, can Google's internal "simplicity sprint" plan really mobilize the work efficiency of employees?