After each round of IRIF actions take place and you realize that you were not affected, do not breath a sigh of relief and just go back to doing your job. There WILL be more after this week.
The goal of the current executive team is to sell the company, either in pieces or as a whole.
They say they want to make Xerox into a "technology powerhouse". So where is the hiring or realignment activity occurring to make that happen? The answer is, it's not. There have been huge cuts to the XIM organization since August - and they are the ones that do all of the "technology" work.
The "technology powerhouse" meme is a scam to get the worker bees to stay on board and keep doing their work while the executive team finds a buyer and tries to get the share price up to $40 so Icahn can make a return on his investment. Once that's done he will sell his shares, pocket the money, and leave the remaining unsold pieces to continue their decline into a market segment that shrinks more and more each year while he moves on to another distressed company.
All of the projects that I've been involved in or consulted on (and it's not a small number) have a requirement to provide a payback within 6 months. Just two quarters on the corporate calendar. Does that sound like they are interested in long-term growth to you? My group and others have proposed projects that will have a large rate of return after all of the system and people investments are done, but the payback period is 12+ months so they were not approved. And they went to the highest level for review, so it's not like a local controller or VP were the only approval authority.
As I've said in other posts, I'm not angry or bitter. I've been here for a long time and I've benefited from working here. All of this is to say that for those of you not affected by the IRIF actions, do not get complacent. Make as many LinkedIn contacts as you can. Have a final copy of your resume ready. Start going on interviews, even if just for the practice. Have your own departure plan ready before someone taps you on the shoulder for a meeting with HR. Stay in contact with your colleagues that have been let go, partly to give them support and encouragement in their job search, but also because they will be venturing out into the job market and may become your best contact for getting a job once they land somewhere else.
And lastly, just some input that has been offered to me in the past. Never equate your job with your self worth. Your job is a means to a financial goal, it's not your identity. If you happen to be impacted by an IRIF you still have all of the skills you've used up to this point. Being impacted doesn't take anything away from who you are. It just means you now have the opportunity to use those skills in a different environment, or learn new ones.