The spate of employee layoffs has finally reached e-retail companies. After Helpchat, Zomato, TinyOwl and several others had fired employees over the course of the last few months, it has emerged that Snapdeal is on the verge of laying off as many as 200 employees from its workforce.
The company has given these employees two choices – either enter its Performance Improvement Plan, or resign. The Performance Improvement Plan will require that employees meet stringent performance targets. Failure to do so would mean termination from the company.
Snapdeal’s employees, however, are complaining that the performance targets outlined in the Performance Improvement Plan are impossible to meet. “We are being asked to achieve an 85% customer satisfaction score, which is impossible because the company’s score has never crossed 62-64%,” one of the affected employees told ET. “Hence, most of us are leaving because we don’t want this to show in our resume.”
Snapdeal maintains that this is not a layoff. “Some of the employees have chosen not to go through the Performance Improvement Plan and have instead opted to exit. In deference to their wishes, Snapdeal has accepted their resignations.”, a company spokesperson said.
Snapdeal has been trimming its customer service department for a while now. In April 2015, the department had close to 1,000 employees, but currently has only 500. Of these, 200 have been put into the Performance Improvement Plan. These numbers either point to deficiencies in employee training that’s causing employees to underperform in large numbers, or a desire to downsize by the company.
Just last week, Snapdeal had raised a $200 million funding round that valued it at $7 billion.
[Update: As of 26th Feb, as many as 500 employees have been allegedly sacked, leading to a volley of protests by the affected employees]