SINCE ACCENTURE ANNOUNCED last week that it would be cutting 890 Irish jobs, on top of the roughly 400 layoffs it made earlier this year, employees at the professional services company have remained largely in the dark about the details of their redundancy.
The Journal has spoken to a number of employees “in scope” for redundancy who say that clear information has not been forthcoming from executives at the firm, which has said it intends to lay off 19,000 workers across the world.
“Those of us in-scope are very upset by the decision, not necessarily because of the decision to move staff from ‘high cost locations’ to ‘cost effective locations’ but because of the way that the information has been drip fed to us,” said one Accenture worker.
This feeling of uncertainty has taken hold since the layoffs were announced in March because employees are unsure of their fates.
“Since then, we’ve had little to no information from leadership regarding our timelines. This makes the future very hard to plan for and I can personally attest to the stress and anxiety the in-scope staff are experiencing.”
This approach, he says, is antithetical to Accenture’s stated commitment to “wellness and mental health”.
He and his colleagues suspect that management’s heel dragging is deliberate and coercive.
“Many of us believe this prolonged ambiguity regarding our departure dates is by design with the desired effect being a mass exodus. This would obviously be cheaper than paying out mass severance payments.”
The resentment among some of the affected workers is obvious, especially since the company recorded a net profit of more than €6 billion last year, up from around €5.4 billion the year before.
“We’re glad the company is doing well all the same, the shareholders must be delighted.”
According to another employee at Accenture, the feeling among those in line for redundancy is one of “anger”, mostly because the jobs are being moved en masse to countries with lower labour costs.
“These redundancies,” he says, “are part of a role transition programme from leadership in the US, called ‘finance transformation’, which is a lovely made up catchphrase which is essentially moving all finance roles whose cost can’t be billed to clients to India.
“All consultants whose costs can be billed to clients have been left out of the redundancies.”
“They’re just all angry because I’ve been there for five years, some of my colleagues have been there over ten years and myself, I’ve just purchased a house. And we’ve just been told that ‘your job’s still there, we’re just moving it to somewhere else’. It’s a bit ridiculous.”
He says people are “shocked” at the speed of this latest process of laying people off.
He acknowledges that jobs moving to other parts of the globe is not unusual in the corporate world, but says that this is often done incrementally, with one position being moved abroad when someone retires or moves on.
“This has been occurring for a number of years but usually it occurs when an employee leaves Accenture for employment elsewhere and the role gets moved from Ireland to India, but this time senior leadership in the US don’t want to wait for employees to move on by their own accord and are forcing redundancies.”
He says the mood is an angry one “because the jobs are still there, they’re just moving them away from Ireland.”
Some people have already left his team since the layoffs were announced and the rest have been told they are to be made redundant, leaving just one senior member to help train the new Indian team and assist in the transition.
This process is underway across multiple corporate function departments including finance, legal and HR .
He says the company is using an array of “buzzwords” like “finance reimagined” and “business optimisation” to describe the process of “just moving basically any corporate function to an area that’s cheaper”.
A lot of the jobs at Accenture in Ireland fall into the corporate function category, which goes some way towards explaining the relatively high number of layoffs here compared to other countries.
The consultation process is set to begin in September. When the company first made the announcement, it issued a statement which said:
“We will be commencing a collective employee consultation for a proposed redundancy programme that is expected to affect around 890 people at Accenture in Ireland. We do not plan to comment further while the consultation process is ongoing.”
There have been questions raised by unions and workers about how many of these redundancies will be forced and how many will be voluntary. However, the process is a “tick box exercise”, according to one source inside the company.
“The consultation process is just tick box exercises and management have said any application for voluntary redundancies will more than likely be denied.”
On top of the uncertainty about their short-term futures, employees in line for redundancy now face the degrading prospect of having to train in their own replacements.
“Essentially they’re going to be recruiting the team that I’m on in India now and I guess I’m supposed to train them up over the next six, seven, eight months.”
This, he says, is what happened with the last round of layoffs, too.
“Before you’re let go you basically have to train up your replacement.”
This might seem like a task too demoralising to be worth sticking around to complete, but there are a number of factors that will keep people there during the transition.
“Most people will stay and take the redundancy package and then go on. But there are other things, like it depends on how long you’ve been in the firm.
“You have to stay so many years to get a better redundancy package or keep your pension contributions and all these things, so there are various reasons why people need to stay until the end.”
Meanwhile, a third source at the company who is not one of those affected by the layoffs told The Journal that the mood is “cautious” and “intense”, saying that people are not discussing it openly as they want to be sensitive to those who are set to lose their jobs.
“Overall, people avoid talking much (about it),” she says, with conversations being had in private rather than in groups.
She describes her colleagues as feeling apprehensive because of the lack of clear information from management and says people are already having to reconsider plans due to the uncertainty of their financial situation.
“You can feel people already being conscious about upcoming spends they might have been planning that are now put on pause”.
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