Did you hear? Alcon is changing job titles across the board. Word is, the real plan is to slim down the workforce without actually having to do layoffs. It’s all a bit sneaky if you ask me!
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@294m this was a long game!
@2noi If everyone has the same title (no matter how fancy that was...) You could easily say, your job is eliminated because it's redundancy. Your service is no longer needed. If a research department include 2 Mech Engineer, 2 Material Engineer, 2 Optic Engineer... etc. Then come the title change that reduces 3 separate functions into one same title, lets call them System Engineers. HR will say, your department has 6 System Engineers... we think you can do away it with 4.
Any talk of another RIF? Some rumors of a voluntary severance or buy out have circulated recently.
We have a lot of Executives on onsite right now and the trend has shown this almost always leads to layoffs at least that's been the case in the past.
Have not heard about title streamlining, but agree makes sense. Over time title inflation (i.e field sales extensive use of "director") and exceptions or enhancers (i.e adding "senior", "Strategic", "executive", etc) adds up. Some might elect to leave due on that. This can come with re-setting salary bands, ether immediately or after a grace period. That might spur more voluntary exits if compensation is reduced. If cost savings is the goal then fitting people into revised bands could spur voluntary exits for those losing comp. If not, they can "grandfather" people.
Anyone hearing about good old fashioned layoffs? I could see end of year to start out 2025 with immediate cost reduction.
Not sure how changing titles would slim down the workforce, but yes, titles are changing to be more streamlined across levels. This was announced to many groups much earlier in the year, so it’s not exactly covert. New titles have already been communicated to a lot of those affected. There aren’t salary or level changes involved, and the change makes sense considering the huge number of job titles across the organization that sometimes can be confusing.
I’m not saying that it’s not likely that change is coming which could be bad, but this isn’t related to that as far as I know, and actually makes sense to me.
How do title changes reduce heads?