Who is superior - the long term interest of the employees or the immediate profit of the company?

- Talk-Think-Shishir Ramavat

- The 'trend' of laying off employees has been going on since the 1980s. In 1979, less than five percent of companies on the Fortune Hundred list laid off their employees. In 1994, this figure reached 45 percent.

First of all read this short post:

A man was working at Microsoft for 21 years. His job was lost. Another man spent 16 years at Google. Her job is also gone. How clumsy is the way to take away the job. They are completely blocked from office systems and informed via email that you are being fired. While hiring a candidate, the HR (Human Resources) manager of the company throws a barrage of questions at him, why did you change so many jobs earlier? Why can't you stay loyal to one company for long? Now the point is this: When the company itself does not value loyalty, why should an employee hold the tail of loyalty?'

A young man named Abhishek, a pass-out from IIM-Ranchi, posted this post on the professional networking site LinkedIn and it received an outpouring of reactions. IT (Information Technology) companies around the world like Twitter, Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft have laid off employees at an average rate of 1600 per day in January, so the lives of IT professionals have been lost.

Silicon Valley companies are not paying off huge financial investments in new initiatives. Amazon has created a robotics division, Microsoft has created a virtual reality division called AltSpaceVR, and a Metaverse division. All these are related to futuristic technology. This work consumes a lot of money. The concern of the management of the companies is whether the current staff will be useful in achieving the new goals we have set in this changing situation. When it comes to choosing between the long-term interest of its employees and the short-term financial results of the company, it is obvious that the Tostan Multinational Company prefers the short-term financial results. In this regard, the example of Nokia company is worth knowing in detail.

A few years ago, Nokia had a great influence in the mobile phone market. In a single year of 2008, the income of this Finnish company increased by 67 percent, so the people were happy, but the Asian company like Samsung made a big entry in the mobile market and the demand for Nokia's mobile phones started to decrease. In the unfinished, Nokia plant in Bochum, Germany, labor costs rose by 20 percent. The management decided at the end of the discussion: Close the Bochum plant! It meant shutting down the plant, taking away the jobs of 2,300 workers altogether. The then Senior President (HR) of Nokia himself gave the news of this opportunity to the employees and Ho-Ho was shocked.

Fifteen thousand people took to the streets in Bochan city the very next week to protest against this decision of Nokia management. The German government investigated and ordered the management to refund the huge subsidy we gave you for this plant! Images of Nokia employees crying, Nokia phones being trampled underfoot started flooding the media. In total, Nokia decided to close the Bochum plant at a cost of 200 million pounds. This is only the economic loss figure. Nokia's share price tumbled. The outrage and boycott in the media around the world is different. According to one estimate, between 2008 and 2010, Nokia made a huge loss of 700 million euros in sales and 100 million euros in profits.

No, the matter does not end here. In 2011, to offset the growing losses, Nokia decided to lay off 18,000 of its employees working in 13 countries. Well, this time Nokia's management had the experience of the Bochum plant. This time the process was handled in such a way that the retrenching employees felt the pressure slowly.

Meanwhile, Microsoft came into the picture. Microsoft completely missed the bus of the mobile market. Microsoft's management became interested in Nokia's sinking strategy. Belatedly, but this was a good opportunity to enter the mobile market. In late 2013, it was announced that Microsoft would buy Nokia for five billion euros. It was decided that operations in Korea and India would remain with Nokia due to tax-related legal ramifications, but all phones manufactured by Nokia from now on would be for the Microsoft brand. By the time Microsoft and Nokia joined hands, Nokia had already sold 25 crore 1 million handsets. Lumia series phones with Microsoft's Windows operating system were sold only three crore units. Locho happened in the matter of hardware. After the merger with Nokia, it was expected that Microsoft would now make the Windows operating system free on all phones. That didn't happen. Microsoft has not yet solved the problem of how to license the Windows operating system. The result? In 2015, Microsoft laid off another 7,800 employees, suffered multimillion-dollar losses, and finally exited the mobile market in 2016 by selling its mobile business to a Finnish company called HMD Global. The sinking of Nokia also dealt a severe financial blow to Microsoft. The HMD company still makes mobile phones today, but its target audience is not Samsung or Apple customers. The rest of the Nokia phones have now become museum items.

Those who have closely studied this type of behavior in multinational companies say that sometimes employees are either fired badly, the decision to fire them is wrong, or both are true. Some countries have enacted laws to protect employees from layoffs by companies. As such, companies in many European countries cannot lay off people at will. France also had such a law, which was repealed some time ago. There is no such law in America, so American companies can fire their employees as they please.

The 'trend' of laying off employees is nothing new. It has been running since the 1980s. In 1979, less than five percent of companies on the Fortune Hundred list laid off their employees. In 1994, this figure reached 45 percent. Between 2008 and 2011, 65 percent of America's Fortune Hundred companies made more or less employees unemployed. If the future looks even bleak due to intense competition, multinational companies lay off their employees.

A company's present will not be rosy by sending employees home. Employees who leave take their experience, skills and contacts with them. Employees who survive layoffs lose their morale. He can't be as enthusiastic as before in the work of the company. They feel insecure. They feel that no matter how hard I work, be loyal or show loyalty, tomorrow may be my turn. A study found that 41 percent of employees left behind after a large-scale layoff at a multinational company experienced a decrease in job satisfaction, 20 percent experienced a decline in performance, and 36 percent experienced a decrease in company loyalty.

One thing out of a hundred. The first loyalty and devotion of the management of a high profile company that is sitting in the country and abroad is towards its stakeholders and shareholders. Number of employees comes next. At this stage of the twenty-first century, the equations of relationship between companies and employees have definitely changed.