Thread regarding Ricoh layoffs

“I believe you have my stapler?”

My experience has been in Canada and would agree with the stupid by design explanation below. Incredibly hard to discern intentional from negligence from politics... which is impressive as Canada is such a small market.

This report is from the UK, but makes me think of a book I just finished. It will take me a minute to get to my point. When Ricoh launched the 1st VSIP program they said the ratio of older employees to younger employees was significantly tilted towards the older employees. Anyone working for Ricoh at the time could see that was true as previous RIFs tended to hit the newest employees. Officially they said was hurting the company as there would be a brain drain when tenured people retired over the next decade. They also said due to changes in health insurance regulations and older work force resulted in higher costs of benefits. Although not said officially, the strategy of replacing high paid individuals with very low paid new hires. In fact they created new lower paid grade positions that had to be used for new hires.

Now for my point. When VSIP launched HR said they had worked with specialists to formulate a "legal" way to incentivize older employees to leave on there own. VSIP being a positive motivator for someone to leave on there own. What this book talked about is law firms that specialize in getting protected classes to leave on their own. Saving the employer the cost of severance. The quick way to describe the strategy is to demoralize through constant negative changes and lack of support. The goal is creating so much stress that employees get fed up and leave on their own. What you might perceive to be poor leadership might just be working by design.
When you contrast how they are committed to making this a better work environment for hard to please less productive millennials it really makes you wonder.
"Were the stress levels they are now concerned about actually part of crafted strategy"