How Snapdeal's layoffs could be a good thing

Snapdeal's leadership decided to come clean about its mistakes, reports Tech in Asia

Today Snapdeal, India’s third largest e-commerce company, announced that it was laying off staff to "rationalise" its workforce as it aims to "become India’s first profitable e-commerce company in two years". Sources in the company say the layoffs are going to impact roughly 500-600 employees.

In this environment, Kunal Bahl and Rohit Bansal’s letter comes as a welcome break.

According to most industry experts, a serious upheaval in a company needs three broad moves:

1) Asking for help from the right people

Snapdeal seems to have started on this track earlier this year when it hired Jason Kothari as chief strategy and investment officer. At that moment the company was selling the story of how Jason and Kunal are friends and go way back, but we soon started seeing changes in the business.

Snapdeal’s unit Shopo got shut, layoffs were announced, and Freecharge got taken over by Jason.

2) Ditch the cloak and dagger

Childish as it may sound when billions of dollars are involved, people working for or with India’s start-up community will be able to regale you with stories of broken internal communications, half-truths, ostrich-like behaviour, and a me-too-ness that is more the stuff of high school drama than serious business. That the Snapdeal leadership decided to come clean about its mistakes and communicate those clearly with employees is a departure from that. 

3) Be ready to swallow pride

It can’t have been easy to accept that they "started diversifying and starting new projects while we still hadn’t perfected the first or made it profitable. We started building our team and capabilities for a much larger size of business than what was required with the present scale". This is an excerpt from Tech in Asia. You can read the full article here