Amusing to see those 20-somethings (including H1Bs) arrive with their laptop and spreadsheets. Then interview experienced workers twice their age as how their duties are redundant. Life changing consequences for the workers.
It's obvious the company is making the call, it doesn't matter if it's through an intermediary.
Of course it's obvious, but with McKinsey called in, management can deflect blame and claim "it's the consultants that deemed your job being redundant, not us, we only called them in to cut costs"
I still don't buy this. The idea that this is some PR exercise seems lousy to me. It makes much more sense that it is a third party arbitration.
Layoffs are a huge distraction for a business, and so, don't happen except at need. When they do happen, they almost invariably involve losing employees tasked with things the company still needs to do. That leaves a bunch of short term business design problems of how to reassign those tasks to minimize disruption:
"We had to lose 30 salespeople, who will cover those sales territories?"
"If we got rid of dedicated agile coaches, would product managers have time to plan and run the scrum meeting? If we're able to keep 1, which teams should they work with?"
These types of questions can be analysis-heavy, are non recurring, and land on top of normal workloads (meaning executives may not have time to do them themselves), so it makes sense to hire a contractor to work on them.
> These types of questions can be analysis-heavy, are non recurring, and land on top of normal workloads (meaning executives may not have time to do them themselves), so it makes sense to hire a contractor to work on them.
No one actually does that though, otherwise the people being laid off would not be the poor sods at the bottom of the ladder but the countless layers of middle management.
C-level execs rarely give a single flying finger about the people their "decisions" affect, or how the company will fare long term, and that is the point. By the time the consequences of "dumb razor firing" become apparent and the problems untenable, the CEO who had decided on this has long moved on to another company who needed a "savior in need" and pocketed a nice fat bonus for a 20% reduction in payroll.