Posted by Brian McCullough
According to Valleywag, the layoffs at Yahoo are not only being mis-managed, the very notion that they resorted to layoffs when they maybe didn’t have to is a further symptom of management dysfunction.
Yahoo’s pending plans for layoffs have curious timing. You see, a number of Yahoos were in the job market already. A fair number of them have restricted-stock grants which vest in February, removing a last reason to stay. And yet managers are encouraging employees who were ready to quit to stay on through the layoffs. Why?
To comprehend such bad business, you’d have to understand Yahoo’s HR bureaucracy. Managers are alloted a certain headcount. When an employee quits, under the current hiring freeze, the manager’s headcount is reduced, but they get no credit for making the cut. If the manager keeps the employee on, but puts his name on a layoff list, then they both win: The employee gets a severance package, and the manager gets to cut an employee he’d have lost anyway.
And so it would be easy — painless, really — for Yahoo to take its natural turnover and repackage it for Wall Street as “layoffs.”
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