Top Global Tech Giant To Layoff 25,000 Employees - Details Here

As the world is still struggling amid the economical crisis due to the pandemic, global technology consulting giant Accenture will soon be firing hundreds of Australian staff as it moves to cut at least 5 percent of its global workforce.

This big move is taken as a result of plummeting demand amid the pandemic. Sources in the Australian operations of the US-listed firm told The Australian Financial Review publishing house that the global cuts could hit 25,000 staff.

This is an initial wave of job losses, targeting the bottom 5 percent of employees by performance measures, that was completed by August 14. 

Meanwhile, another 5 percent of local staff are under threat after being flagged as demand of new performance improvement plans. The sources further stated that underutilised staff, who are "on the bench" were being told to find a project to work on or else they would be targeted soon.

Taking a closer look in the current plan, with about 5,000 staff employed by Accenture locally, the redundancy numbers would be about 250, but it is taken into note to currently sit around 180.

Recently, at the internal global staff meeting which was streamed online this month, Accenture chief executive Julie Sweet faced few questions from staff being changed to internal performance assessments. To which she said that despite cutting staff and stopping fresh recruitment, the company still needed to reduce numbers. 

"It was important that staff understood the business context of the employee transitions out of the firm. We finished our second quarter at the end of February and we were growing 8 percent. We were having an incredible year," Sweet said.

Further talking about how the growth collapsed to 1.3 percent, Sweet asserted that "chargeability, or the amount of working hours its staff could attribute to paying clients, had dropped below 90 percent for the first time in a decade, and performance metrics were being used to target staff to transition out of the company."

"In a normal year, we transition out about 5 percent and we hire to replace them, because we are in a demand scenario. Right now, we're not in a demand scenario, so if we manage out the same percentage of people and don't replace them, it allows us to continue to invest and preserve some people who have lower chargeability for when the market comes back. This year, in addition to the normal 5 percent, we've identified more people who need improvement ... So we're making sure ... if we have to make other actions, we know where our performance is," Sweet added in the meeting. 

Taking a look at the global picture, Accenture has more than 5,00,000 people, which means the layoff of 5 percent equates to at least 25,000 people worldwide. This big layoff news comes a year after Accenture's Australian leadership was significantly cut following sales targets being missed.