In a latest development, the world’s most-valued edtech company, Byju’s has laid off another 1,000-1,200 employees.
Byju’s Laid-off Employees
With this move, the edtech seeks to bring down costs amid slower revenue growth and a worsening funding winter.
This move will be affecting people from the engineering, sales, logistics, marketing and communications teams, according to the people familiar with the matter.
So far, around 300 employees have been sacked from the engineering team.
Similarly, the logistics team’s strength has come down to 50 percent since October, as per the sources.
In fact, edtech has been outsourcing logistics and so the company has reduced its in-house logistics team size by 50 percent.
In multiple internal emails, Byju Raveendran, co-founder and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Byju’s had reassured their employees that the company would not be laying off anyone as it cut 5 percent of its staff or about 2,500 employees in October.
“Byju’s will prioritize rehiring the laid-off employees as it restructures and hires again for ‘newly created relevant roles,” said Raveendran, In an internal email in October.
How Did This Happen?
The sources said that none of the employees were told about the layoffs over mail, as emails tend to get leaked
Interestingly, Byju’s told employees over normal WhatsApp calls to join a call over Google Meet.
During this call, the employees were informed about the layoffs there, said the sources.
One laid off employee said, “They were informed that since the team is not generating enough revenues, they will have to be let go, which is funny because generating revenue is not part of OKRs (objectives and key results) in the first place,” during the call.
It appears that the edtech company is requesting employees to resign as they say, being laid off would not look good on the employee’s CV.
The employee said, “On paper, they are showing that I have resigned. They say this is done so it doesn’t look bad on my CV. They are only paying me for the notice period and other benefits, as it would be if I resigned on my own,”.
The employees said that they were then put on garden leave for one month.
Here mentioned, Garden leave is the period where an employee has resigned and is instructed to not come to the workplace during the notice period without compromising on the benefits of the same.
Furthe, the HR informed them about their full and final payment for the notice period along with all the earned leave but added that there would be no extra severance above that.
Interestingly, the exit processes have been completed for these employees, still, they have not yet received any written communication on the company’s decision to let them go.
The company has also removed slack access for these employees, so there’s no common platform for communication for the whole company.
Now, everything is lying around on WhatsApp, which is really insecure.
Another employee said that the company has revoked Slack access for a few months because the company didn’t want to pay for it.
By the time this article was written, Byju’s declined to comment on the story.
It seems that the latest round of layoffs comes at a time when Byju’s has been looking to cut costs aggressively since last year after it reported a net loss of Rs 4,589 crore in FY21 (2020-21), the largest by a startup in India for that year.
