Ola Fires 1,400 Staff Amid 95% Fall In Revenues Due To CoronaVirus
Ola recently made an announcement to fire approximately 1,400 employees. The reason behind such act is the fact that as the company has been going through a tough time due to the Covid-19 nationwide lockdown. According to the company itself, constant loss of revenue had made it to fire it’s employees. As a matter of fact, Ola has been facing over 90% of business losses in the past couple of months.
Bhavish Aggarwal who is the co-founder of Ola along with the CEO wrote an email to their employees to enlighten them about upcoming job cuts. “In these tough times, I am conveying this information with heavy heart and I think that this may be the toughest decision I have ever taken in my life – as you all know that our business have taken a great hit from this COVID-19 lockdown, I thought it would be better to downsize our organization and let go of 1400 of my valued employees,” This specific issue was mentioned within the email.
The decision came soon after its rival Uber made a decision to let go of up to 700 employees in India and more than thousands all across the world. Apparently, businesses/companies that belong in travel, hospitality, and mobility space have taken a serious hit amidst this global lockdown. Here you can see the OLA LayOff News.
With this decision, Ola laid off about 30-35% of its total workforce of 6000. For instance, last year in December, the company had fired more than 500 employees, which, to be honest, is a big number.
Bhavish Aggarwal’s email also stated which I quote, “Ever since my last email 6 weeks ago, I was hoping to write again but with better news to begin. Unfortunately, the COVID-19 crisis has been something I was never expecting, it is causing continuous issues and unprecedented economic and social destruction all around us.”
Just to make things more tolerable and to compensate the fired employees, Ola has stated that it will provide a payout of 3 months of their fixed salary, irrespective of their notice period. Other than that, those employees who have spent great amount of time with the company will be eligible to receive higher payouts depending upon their tenure.
Moreover, all eligible ESOPs will vest forward to the closest quarter. Ola also stated that those who may not have completed a year with us, we will do our best to enable pro-rated vesting for the overall period of time spent with us. Here you can check the 10 Problems Indian Companies Will Face Post Lockdown.
Quite recently itself, Swiggy and Zomato have done the same thing. Both companies provided some sort of a relief to those employees who are being laid off. On the lines of these similar motives, Ola is planning on extending medical, life, and accident insurance cover for its staff along with their families up to 31st December 2020 or the start of their next job. The company will also allow its employees to retain their company issued laptops.
Moreover, For the welfare of driver-partners all across the nation, Ola will provide lease rental to over 30,000 leasing drivers giving which will ultimately give them relief of up to ₹25,000 a month. Now that is something they can look up to.
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Aggarwal also made an assurance that this layoff will act as a one-time exercise and will be finished by the end of this week for their India Mobility business. Besides that, by the end of next week this process will come to an end for Ola foods and Ola Financial Services. According to him and his email, there will be no COVID related pay cut or any sort of firing.