With the recent announcement, I'm curious to know how layoffs work at SAP? Do managers provide a list? Have managers already been asked to provide a list? Is it somewhat random?
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IMHO in the past, SAP tries hard to look like they are playing by the book on these things. Every team and country could be slightly different but they use the same general rules to identify people. They’ve publicly said this is restructuring and not performance based. If you have a team that is being eliminated because it’s no longer a focus, the entire team goes. Everyone has the same ability to find new role elsewhere in company. For teams that are merging or being restructured to be smaller, they generally need to justify either job overlap or role elimination. While performance shouldn’t be factor, it’s very much an undocumented factor. Imagine a manager faced with 2 people now doing same job but only has HC for one. They will pick the best performing one or the least problematic person.
The number to reduce and teams to eliminate starts at L1 and gets pushed down to L2, L3, L4 to make individual decisions on people where needed. Some level of trading goes on at lower levels between managers if can be justified under overall guidelines and total target is still hit. I’m thinking that’s why this is taking so long to be communicated. You have a core team at the top of each org (under NDA probably) trying to finalize these lists going back and forth with lower level mgr HR and legal to finalize this. They should have done that b4 the announcement, but it’s a side effect of dealing with European countries. I’m sure most of it is done by now in NA. Expect notification meetings to start Feb 13ish.
The manager's manager's manager is given a list! They have NO SAY in the number of HC lost!
L1 Managers can add an exclusion list, but either way, they are losing those HC, it's a question of who they put their job on the line to keep! If they exclude one individual, and it turns out there is a connection or he has a relationship with that individual, the L1 manager will lose their job along with the individual.
L1 are SVP/EVP level, so it's unlikely they will do anything exceptional to save someone unless there is an individual critical to a deal or product in 2023.