Perform or perish, Snapdeal tells 200 employees

Amid growing competition from rivals like Amazon and Flipkart, e-commerce major Snapdeal has put its 200 employees on a 'performance improvement' notice under which they need to improve within a month or get terminated.
"The PIP process is expected to cover about 200 team members. As part of the on-going performance management and development programme, some team members at our contact centre have been offered a performance improvement plan (PIP)," a Snapdeal spokesperson said.
Under PIP, employees have been given 30 days to improve performance, and failure to improve will result in termination of services.
The spokesperson said while many have opted for PIP, some have decided not to go for it and instead move on voluntarily.

"Snapdeal has over one million daily transacting users on its ecosystem and all our efforts are focused on becoming part of the daily life of millions of Indians," the spokesperson said.
Following the notification, some employees demonstrated outside a Delhi-based call centre of Snapdeal.

According to reports, Snapdeal has started reducing employee count at its contact centre from November last year, bringing it down to about 600, from a peak of 1,800-2,000.
According to industry sources, this has been a practice for some time now.
"When you have cheaper third-party sourcing available, keeping a huge team for customer-support services does not make sense. Large e-commerce companies are already doing it," they said.

There have been no lay-offs, the company said, which has a team of some 8,000 people across the country.
The booming online commerce in India has created thousands of jobs across the country.
While most of these companies continue to be driven by investor money, concerns around profitability are being raised and many of these firms are now looking at restructuring their business model to run leaner operations.