As with most businesses across the world, the COVID-19 global pandemic is upending companies of all sizes and leaving millions unemployed in its wake.
The latest company to join the list of COVID-19 related restructurings is none other than LinkedIn, where a message from CEO Ryan Roslansky to employees details the struggles the enterprise social networking site is currently undergoing.
After weeks of discussion and deliberation, the executive team and I have made the extremely difficult decision to reduce approximately 960 roles, or about 6 percent of our employee base, across our Global Sales and Talent Acquisition organizations. I’m sharing this news today so that everyone has the complete picture of these changes and why we are making them, and I want you to know these are the only layoffs we are planning.
The reduction of 960 roles across multiple countries is a massive undertaking and today’s company-wide announcement lays out LinkedIn’s plan to effectively let go of 6 percent of their worker base.
- Affected employees who work in North America, Brazil, and parts of APAC will be made aware of the impacts on their roles in the next 24 hours. These departing employees will be with us through August 21st. Impacted employees in Dubai will also be notified in the next 24 hours and will be with us through September 29th.
- Employees in Ireland, the UK, and Australia have begun a consultation about potential impacts on roles and we will continue to work through those locally.
- Employees who work in France, Sweden, and Spain will learn more about the proposed impact on roles during August, and employees in Italy will hear about proposed impacts in September.
LinkedIn is offering the newly departed employees a relatively comprehensive severance package that includes, a year of continuing health insurance, ten weeks of severance pay, a six-month career transition assistance, the ability to keep work-related technology, immigration support, and potential placements.
While being downsized is never an easy transition the only solace in today’s LinkedIn announcement for the remaining employees is that unlike its parent company Microsoft, the networking site doesn’t plan on this downsizing to be a quarterly or yearly occurrence.
As I said above, this is the only reduction we’re planning. This is painful to go through as an organization, but a company with a vision as bold as ours will have to make difficult decisions. And since our vision is more important than it ever has been given all that’s going on in the world, I’m confident we’ll emerge more resilient and stronger than ever.
