Hello friends, this is what I hear from my couple of people-friendly L2s.
Guru and team flew to Viasat International Headquarters recently (that is London, England, to you and me) to figure out how to ‘fix’ the Viasat cost base.
The challenge for the Execs is to find a way to reduce people costs by $100M, and to do that before the end of this year. No surprise, right?
But we heard a new ‘hint’ on the town hall that this time around we can volunteer to lose our jobs. It’s kind of outsourcing a RIF, to us!
Smart, because all the ‘unpleasantness’ of a RIF is avoided if we sign-up to leave voluntarily & with an “enhanced package”. It also might be a great opportunity for employees of retirement age or anybody with a new job lined up or anybody who’s plain fed up here.
Here's how it could go down.
Leaders are tasked to find ‘volunteers’ from their teams to meet a target headcount reduction (remember - $100M saving needed). That target will be a percentage spread like peanut butter across the company. How big? Y’all can't count it on one hand (you may need two or three hands).
‘Volunteers’ will need to leave the business in autumn or Christmas, as all costs must be saved in 2024. It's unclear how we volunteer to leave, (and how volunteering numbers will be made to line up against those executive savings goals). Or what happens if there are too few volunteers, or if the wrong kind of people volunteer, or if too many people volunteer :)
Of course, NOT volunteering to leave kind of means that we accept to take on all the work abandoned by exiting colleagues, as our Exec seem incapable of stopping any of the unprofitable activities.
Be on the lookout for impending ‘quiet communications’ about all of this.
Viasat has decided there will be no RIF. But this may look like, smell like and feel like a RIF?
Smart executives might want to avoid standing in the way of the exit, lol.