Ideal layoffs or more than 10,000 people: In order to prevent trouble, it is necessary to pass the inspection before entering the factory, and persuade employees to call themselves voluntary resignation

Tram depot

2024-05-28 18:36Creators in the automotive field

Ideal layoffs or more than 10,000 people: In order to prevent trouble, it is necessary to pass the inspection before entering the factory, and persuade employees to call themselves voluntary resignation

Li Auto's layoffs, which began at the beginning of this month, are finally coming to an end at the end of this month.

During the month of layoffs, the ideal employees experienced quite a tumultuous moment, both physically and psychologically, and one ideal employee vividly described the layoff process as a "lottery layoff":

At the beginning of the layoffs, everyone couldn't feel any rules at all, and only a small number of employees were notified every day, and people in the department were panicked, and what everyone was most afraid of was receiving Feishu pop-ups.

With the gradual expansion of the scope of layoffs, everyone slowly found out that this was an "indiscriminate" layoff for socially recruited employees. The ideal employee said that before he was laid off, it was rare to see socially recruited employees who joined the company after November last year.

The true number of layoffs is also up for consideration. Previously, according to domestic media reports, the ideal layoff rate was 18%, involving a total of 5,600 employees.

However, according to the tram yard learned from a number of employees who were laid off, the total number of layoffs that are closer to reality may be close to 10,000. Relevant personnel told the tram yard that during this layoff, the total number of ideal employees dropped from more than 30,000 at the peak to about 22,000;

For the hardest-hit areas of this layoff, the HR department may be 60% of the layoffs, the parking project and the operating system LIOS may be 50%, and the ideal AD Pro project team is almost "wiped out". And as of press time, the layoffs have not really come to an end.

In recent years, Li Auto has been known in the industry for its generous distribution mechanism.

For example, Ideal has issued a year-end bonus for 4-8 months on the eve of the Spring Festival in 2024, far exceeding the industry average; For another example, at the Ideal MEGA press conference, the founder Li Xiang promised to achieve the same level of blue-collar income in the factory as developed countries such as Japan and Germany within three years.

I don't know if in order to maintain this consistent corporate image, Ideal also chose to "secret" in the handling of this layoff:

Ideal has never admitted the layoffs through official channels, and at the end of April this year, Ideal even personally refuted the rumors about layoffs, but according to the employees who were laid off, the layoffs had already started on a small scale at that time.

The "secret" way of laying off employees is not friendly to employees, and the inconsistency between employees and the company greatly increases the cost of trust when looking for their next job.

An ideal employee who was laid off during the probationary period said that when he was interviewed, HR expressed his willingness to cooperate with the background investigation and said that the employee was "voluntarily leaving", but this logic is difficult to hold for those probationary employees who are trying their best to get the opportunity to become a regular employee.

The consequence of not being open and honest enough is that the probationary employee not only has to face the practical problem of "the resume is spent", but also has to be charged with the additional cost of explanation when interviewing the next company, and once the next employee is found to be inconsistent with the company's statement during the background investigation stage, the employee is likely to face the risk of being directly "blocked".

Not only in the ideal, but all car companies are at this point in time to compare the cost of employment.

Some laid-off employees said that a considerable number of laid-off ideal employees want to switch to the head new energy car companies that have been very hot recently, but as long as these car companies know that the employee was laid off by ideal, they will directly reduce their salary by 20% when talking about salary;

In order to get rid of the impact of the layoff on themselves and grasp better job opportunities, some ideal employees do not hesitate to voluntarily leave their jobs and give up compensation before the layoffs are made to themselves.

The widespread and rapid layoffs have also affected the mentality of the employees who are still working to a certain extent. One ideal employee said that for those employees who have not been laid off, everyone is also unwilling to work, and some projects have been suspended for nearly a week.

Li Tie, CFO of Ideal, said in the first quarter conference call that the second quarter will be the most difficult quarter the company has experienced this year. This is just as difficult for the ideal employees who have just been laid off.

Some of the laid-off employees said that Ideal did not give everyone sufficient compensation in accordance with relevant regulations, for example, the compensation for employees during the probation period was only "N", and in the eyes of employees, it should be reasonable to have a one-month notice fee; For employees' unused annual leave, it is also discounted only at twice the rate instead of triple;

An employee who had planned to use his "carer's leave" before being laid off was told by HR that he would be given an explanation of the unused leave and asked him to take it to the next company.

An employee who was laid off during the probationary period said that he did not accept HR's conditions for redundancy compensation at first, but the next time he was interviewed, HR directly took out the employee handbook and pointed out which clauses in the handbook he had violated while working, such as "you can be fired directly if you are late for 5 times" and "you cannot take sick leave during the probationary period", etc., which in his opinion are too harsh;

Another employee also did not accept the compensation conditions given by HR, he thought that there would be two or three rounds of "negotiations" in the future, and he could do his best to fight for the rights and interests of the layoff, but what was waiting for him was a letter of resignation of "unilateral termination of the contract", and there was no room for relaxation.

Such an "efficient" way of laying off employees "annoyed" the ideal laid off employees to a certain extent. Some of the laid-off employees said on social media that they would "raise the banner" in front of the ideal headquarters; Some employees wanted to talk to Li Xiang about the difficulties they were facing, and sent their demands directly to Li Xiang through WeChat.

Ideally, or in anticipation of the possible "overreaction" of some of the retrenched employees, the security measures in front of the headquarters have also been strengthened recently.

An ideal employee said that he drove into the ideal headquarters in a vehicle that had been registered in advance, but was told by the security guard in front of the door that everyone in the car needed to scan the code through Feishu and verify their on-the-job identity before entering the company.

Layoffs of this magnitude did not come without warning. Due to the relatively remote location of Li Auto's Beijing R&D center, HR will emphasize that the ideal canteen can "include two meals" in order to dispel employees' concerns when recruiting.

However, since April, the ideal lunch allowance and overtime meals in the evening have been abolished; The taxi fare, which could be reimbursed for overtime until 8 p.m., has also been postponed by one hour, and the geographical scope of reimbursement has been further restricted.

In the application for office supplies, the company has also begun to get more and more stuck. For example, each employee can only request one pack of napkins per month, and a programmer who needs to write code for a long time can only request one monitor.

An employee of the intelligent driving business said that his department originally planned to focus on development until the Beijing Auto Show in late April, but the project was abruptly stopped in early April, and the centralized development personnel were disbanded and returned to work locally.

Although Li Auto has suffered repeated "hardships" for several months, Li Auto is still one of the most cash-flow-rich car companies in China, with cash reserves of 98.9 billion yuan in the first quarter, more than twice that of Xpeng Motors in the same period.

So why did Li Auto embark on the road of large-scale layoffs? In the view of ideal employees, when the development of the ideal pure electric series is blocked, the barriers of the L series gradually disappear, and the ideal urgently needs to "put the crisis in front".

First of all, the future planning of pure electric series products is still unknown. The tram depot recently visited Li Auto's Shunyi factory in Beijing, and nearly 1,000 Li MEGA vehicles were kept secret in the parking lot.

According to an employee who was laid off, the ideal pure electric series is likely to have a chain reaction because of MEGA, "At present, it is said that it will be 'generalized', and it is difficult to say whether it can be made later, and it may have to be re-planned."

As a production base in Shunyi, which has high hopes for ideals, it has planned an annual production capacity of about 100,000 vehicles and is only responsible for the production of pure electric models, but at this moment, a large amount of production capacity is idling; Previously, according to domestic media reports, the Shunyi factory may have been giving employees holidays for most of the week due to poor sales.

In the first quarter earnings conference call, Li Xiang, founder of Li Auto, also said that the pure electric SUV products originally planned to be released this year will be postponed to the first half of next year.

Secondly, the ideal in the "range extender" and "refrigerator, color TV, large sofa" field of the L series is also facing loss. One of the laid-off employees said that compared with the failure of the ideal MEGA, the sales of the L series did not meet expectations, and the company paid more attention to it.

Li Xiang once said on Weibo that the ideal L7/L8/L9 needs to reach an average monthly sales level of 50,000 units in 2024 in order to contribute 600,000 sales to the ideal family throughout the year, but if all models are only 50,000 units, then Li Xiang himself will have to go out to find a job.

According to relevant statistics, the sales results of the ideal L7/L8/L9 in the first four months of this year were 43,000, 30,000 and 25,000 respectively, and the average monthly performance has not even reached half of Li Xiang's expectations.

The ideal is the originator of the use of "range extenders" and "refrigerators, color TVs, and large sofas" in the industry, but today in 2024, it is an indisputable fact that more and more competing products of the same type of "copying homework" are piling up.

Upward, the ideal needs to resist the intelligent pressure of the M9 given by Huawei's intelligent cabin and intelligent driving; Downward, the ideal needs to be wary of the zero run C10 and Nezha L and other cut-off salaries at the bottom of the kettle on the price of half of the price.

When sales inevitably become the goal of ideal ambition, perhaps only after Tesla and BYD, "the world's third new energy vehicle company to achieve a turnaround" is worth letting Li Auto "desperately defend".

According to the laid-off employee, as far as he knows, if the situation in the third quarter of the ideal is still unsatisfactory, the company is likely to start a second wave of layoffs in September this year, and the list of relevant personnel may have been prepared.

Perhaps, in an ideal view, before sticking to the bottom line of profitability, whether it is layoffs or pure electric vehicles, any factors that may affect the word "profit" should be resolutely implemented or suspended on the spot.

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