It’s one metric: revenue per employee. In a more capital expensive market, such as our current one, this metric is the one corporate managers are focusing on.
For example, Google:
https://fourweekmba.com/google-revenue-per-employee/
Ultimately it’s about something called austerity, which is taught in mba-jargon filled economic theory as a way to keep the working classes inline. Since the 1920s, western countries have used a cycle of expansion and contraction to crush the working people’s power in the interest of controlling inflation (which is really largely the direct result of excess government money printing as a result of imbalanced spending), all the while consolidating more-and-more wealth in smaller and smaller circles of people. It’s an absolutely psychotic way to run a business cycle, and it kills a great many people directly:
https://archive-yaleglobal.yale.edu/content/how-austerity-ki...
The latest deleveraging of worker cries and demands for better conditions and pay comes as workers are asking for more work-at-home and flexibility, a more balanced work/life balance, and focus on similar health and wellness goals, as well as demands for salary raises to keep up with the ongoing inflation.
For three decades worker pay has been dropping. The gap between the growth of productivity and that of a typical worker’s pay has grown quite extreme, and continues to grow through the application of austerity principle:
https://www.epi.org/publication/charting-wage-stagnation/
While it looks like “inflation and interest rates are causing the problems,” it remains easily predictable economic theory that we would find ourselves here. People may not realize it, but since 2020, the US has printed nearly 80% of ALL US Dollars in circulation. To put that in perspective, at the start of 2020 we had ~$4 trillion in circulation. Now, there is nearly $19 TRILLION in circulation, a 375% jump in 3 years.
This of course causes “inflation,” which is in no small part what the news likes to call “excess corporate profits.” Basically inflation benefits those that hold real assets and are closest to the money printers, while crushing those who don’t and are the furthest (often the most marginalized).
And again, austerity is applauded:
https://fortune.com/2023/03/02/marc-benioff-salesforce-earni...
Consider that the market rewards these companies handsomely for their layoffs:
- Amazon had $2.8 million in earnings (before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization – or EBITDA) for every staff member they laid off in January.
- Meta had $3.9 million in earnings for each of the 11,000 staff members they laid off in November. In response to Meta’s cost-cutting strategy, its stock price increased by 19 percent.
- Tech giant Microsoft had an EBITDA of $98.8 billion in 2022. This means they earned $9.8 million for each person they laid off in January 2023.
- Other companies’ layoffs weren’t as difficult to understand: WeWork ended 2022 with an EBITDA of -$824 million, and Spotify ended its fiscal year with an EBITDA of -$290 million.
https://www.business.com/finance/big-tech-earnings-and-layof...
So it’s unfortunately financially rewarding to lay people off, and it’s a measurable economic impact you can show the board and your investors…
Meanwhile there are some CEOs who have figured out how to keep everyone employed, and it points to the fact that this model isn’t the only possible way for businesses to operate:
https://www.benefitnews.com/news/a-tech-ceo-avoided-mass-lay...
There will come a day when the current management ethos becomes unfashionable and mass layoffs become a sign of failure and poor executive management, but unfortunately the market rewards it right now, and ultimately products and employee quality of life are secondary concerns to our rather sociopathic business cycle.
Forgive my diatribe. I have developed quite a passion for this issue over the years, as my training taught me all about layoffs and how to do them, but after running companies for a long while, I’ve become quite unhappy with “business as usual.” This system sucks, and it’s causing massive breakdowns in trust between employees and employers that ultimately cause irreversible harm to actual global competitiveness. The system people live and work in has to be in those people’s best interests to proliferate and ultimately needs to align profit with the best interests of society.
In my mind, the long term concequences of the current system’s breakdown of trust is devastating to everyone involved and counterproductive to lasting global competitiveness (which requires cooperation, teamwork and a growth mindset these adversarial conditions cannot foster), and yet we happily pedal along as if everything is fine.
It’s not.