Dear colleagues,
on January 27th 2020 the European Works Council (EWC) has been notified by European management that they are planning transnational changes that might lead to a significant reduction in force.
These kinds of plans require the involvement of the EWC through an information and consultation meeting. Before and during this meeting the EWC must be informed about the planned changes and has the opportunity to consult on those changes. For this purpose a conference call took place on February 10th.
We would like to inform you about the content and outcome of this call as follows:
Oracle conducted a series of business reviews at the end of Q2 FY20 and decided that due to the development of the business a number of measures are necessary to adapt the spending of the company to the revenue situation. You all have already seen the significant reduction on travel expenses which forms part of this program.
The EWC was introduced to a number of plans to severely reduce the headcount in a number of organizations, in some cases accompanied by structural changes. In aggregate Oracle intends to remove up to 920 roles while approximately 200 new positions will be created. The EWC has asked on various occasions on the affected European countries and the number of affected headcounts per country. However, Central Management has only supplied the list of affected countries. These are Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Luxemburg, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Spain, Sweden and UK. Not affected are Cyprus, Croatia, Malta, Slovakia and Slovenia.
Please be aware, that your country might not face the same percentage of redundancies as outlined below or might not be affected for each line of business that’s presented here in your country.
- EMEA CSM, SaaS
The CSM SaaS organization will hand over the handling of Service Requests to the Support organization, increase the number of customers per CSM, raise the ARR thresholds, increase the number of CSMs per manager and change the ratio between Hub and Field employees. The organization plans to reduce the headcount by approximately 20%.
- EMEA TECH PreSales & CSM
Management introduced a plan to merge the TECH Presales and CSM organizations into one new organization named Technical Cloud Customer Experience Team. Within this new organization there will be four different roles: Cloud Experience Manager, Cloud Architect, Cloud Adoption Project Manager and Cloud Specialist. In addition to this organizational change, Oracle plans to reduce the headcount in this merged organization by 8%.
- EMEA TECH Solution
The EWC was presented a plan to reduce the headcount of this organization by 14%, accompanied with some consolidation of teams.
- EMEA Business Development Group
The Business Development Group which as of now covers CX, HCM, ERP, TECH and Systems will focus their activities on TECH and ERP and reduce them in the other areas. In addition all activities will be centralized in two of the existing hubs (Ireland & Egypt). This would lead to a headcount reduction of 30%.
- Applications Oracle Digital Western Europe
Oracle plans to significantly change the Go-To-Market model for Application Sales in Western Europe. The current model has not given the results management was expecting. Therefore the EWC got presented the following plans:
For each of the three product pillars (HCM, CX, ERPM) a Mid-Market pillar will be set up. These groups will report into the WE Sales lead of the respective product pillar. For HCM and CX these will be Hub-based, for ERPM this will based in the field. This includes PreSales.
Oracle Digital Applications Western Europe will cease to exist. This will result in a headcount reduction of 500 roles (Sales and PreSales).
For the new Mid-Market groups there will be approximately 200 new positions (Sales and PreSales).
Autonomous Database
The ADR organization was just created this fiscal year. As the KPIs don’t reflect the expectations from management, Oracle decided to adjust the headcount to the current situation. This will lead to a reduction of headcount by approximately 28%. Management underlined that is still a very important building block of the strategy.
- Alliances & Channel
A&C plans to simplify of the organization through the unification of the Go-To-Market for TECH, Systems and VADs. The focus will be on Mid-Market and Field implementations as it is today in the A&C SaaS organization. In addition the role of the Digital Partner Center will be strengthened. Along with these changes A&C aims to reduce the headcount by 35 roles.
- Summary
The EWC put strong emphasis on the communication plans to the employees for these changes. Regarding Oracle Digital the EWC has been given the date of the planned communication to employees. This will start on Wednesday 4th of March. The EWC has not been given any details on communication plans for other lines of business. We do believe that only an early and open communication of the
planned changes and headcount reductions does treat the employees with the necessary respect and avoids rumors. Please be aware that local communication time and content may differ because of local legal requirements.
The EWC also discussed the need for more engagement on the topic of redeployment of impacted employees. We believe that Oracle should take a much more active role in this process. Management confirmed that they will support employees seeking for redeployment within Oracle.
While the EWC understands some of the reasons why Oracle has to adjust the plans to the current situation, we also do believe that the current situation results out of some strategic management decisions which had already been subject for debate at previous EWC meetings. The EWC regrets that Central Management had not taken the employee representatives´ feedback into account on those subjects in the past.
Source
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