Ride-hailing platform Ola has decided to call off its plan to lay off employees across different software verticals, a source in the company confirmed to CNBCTV18.com on Friday.
Earlier this week, CNBC-TV18 reported that the company was handing over pink slips to employees across software teams, many of whom were believed to have been working on different aspects of the Ola app. The company had then said 200 employees were likely to be impacted by the jobs cut process. However, following the report, Ola revisited the plan as senior leaders in the company thought the move was “unfair.” “For instance, it appeared in some cases that five software engineers were working on a project that could be tasked to three people. So the firm was looking at restructuring the engineering workforce to minimise redundancy. However, leaders felt the process was unfair,” the source cited above said.
Ola is yet to issue a formal statement on the rolling back of the plan.
Deccan Herald was the first to report that Ola is taking a U-turn on its layoff plan and that Ola founder Bhavish Aggarwal asked the managers to apologise and calm the nerves of their teams. During a town hall on Thursday, Ola’s senior officials are reported to have said sorry to their teams for the "stress and tension" due to the development. "The way we were managing the productivity assessment was probably not as effective as we would want it to be", Ola told DH.
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This comes after Ola on Monday said, "Ola Electric, India’s largest EV company, has been increasing its focus on non-software engineering domains. The focus is on building engineering and R&D capabilities across - vehicle, cell, battery, manufacturing and automation, and autonomous engineering streams. The company currently has around 2000 engineers and aims to increase its engineering talent pool to 5000 over the next 18 months." According to the statement, the company was centralising operations.
The layoff plan came against declining sales of the Ola Electric scooter - launched in December last year. The company has been carrying out a restructuring exercise for the past few months.
It had laid off nearly 2,000 employees due to the closure of the pre-owned car business, Ola Cars, and quick commerce business Ola Dash. Also, more than 30 senior officials, including founder Agarwal's leadership team members, have quit in the last two years.
Ola has also faced flak after its S1 scooter caught fire in March, which along with eight other such incidents, was investigated by a high-level committee. The committee found shortcomings in the BMS, safety mechanisms and the quality of cells used in the battery packs of different electric vehicle companies.
