Human Resource Community

According to reports, Elon Musk owned, Twitter is looking to close its coworking spaces in Delhi and Mumbai after doing so in Bengaluru. Reports citing sources state that the office closing procedure began in December of last year. There are about 80 workers in The Executive Centre in Delhi’s Qutub district and about 150 at the WeWork facility in Mumbai’s BKC. The sources claim that the company has left coworking facilities in Bengaluru as well, indicating that this was the result of company-wide reforms. The remaining employees of Twitter in Singapore were advised to stop coming to work and work remotely earlier this week after Musk, who failed to pay the rent for the San Francisco headquarters, reportedly failed to pay the rent. The decision to let Twitter staff leave the CapitaGreen building and work from home was reportedly communicated to them via email. “Twitter employees were just walked out of its Singapore office – its Asia-Pacific headquarters – over nonpayment of rent”. “Landlords walked employees out of the building,” Casey Newton of Platformer wrote in a tweet on Thursday. Due to its failure to pay the $136,250 rent for its San Francisco office premises, Twitter has been sued in the US.

The ex-employees who left Twitter in November 2022 received severance agreements on January 8, 2023. Twitter cut over half of its 7,500 employees in the beginning of November 2022. Elon Musk, the new CEO, said that all departing employees received three months of severance pay, which is 50% more than what is needed by law. However, the ex-employees claim that they were only given their final two months’ pay through January 4th (the formal date of their termination), and that they were forced to wait to get a post-termination severance payout. Despite Musk’s assurance that they would receive an extra month of pay as severance, the employees contend that given what Twitter had already agreed to pay prior to Musk’s takeover, they are actually owed more. Bonuses, stock vesting, and other benefits that might reach tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of dollars for each employee were also meant to be included in the severance package. The severance agreements that Twitter is offering are actually “settlement agreements,” according to Lisa Bloom, a principal attorney at The Bloom Firm in Los Angeles who is currently representing former Twitter employees. These agreements “SILENCE WORKERS FOR LIFE” and require them to give up significant legal rights.

Allegations have been made against Air India for allegedly not responding to a situation when a man on one of their planes allegedly urinated on a woman. According to a report in the Economic Times, as a result, the company would have to delay the implementation of their new human resources policy. According to reports, the airline’s acquisition deal with the government, signed in January 2022, prohibits it for a year from changing its “terms of employment.” The new human resources policy’s implementation has been delayed as a result, and it can now only go into effect after March 2023. According to the report, union resistance prevented the agreement from going into effect on January 1 as originally anticipated. Since the Tata group does not have a hiring-firing culture, a senior official from the company told the Economic Times, Air India has implemented indirect recognition programmes to reward customer-focused behaviour and accountability. The CEO added that the company is committed to putting the Tata Code of Conduct into practise by doing away with biases and prejudices within the workplace and encouraging staff to base decisions on facts and statistics rather than rumours and conjecture. According to reports, the airline’s management has finished drafting a new service agreement with major performance metrics and objectives. It was mentioned that increased accountability would make the move more efficient. In response to the recent drunk man incident, aviation regulatory body, the DGCA, has given the airline instructions to keep track of any passengers who have displayed disruptive behaviour and to add them to a “No-Fly-List.” The regulator further demanded that the airline notify their internal committee about the incident, which will have 30 days to decide how long the unruly passenger will be prohibited from flying, with options ranging from no days to a permanent ban.

Amazon is reportedly preparing to layoff 1,000 employees in India as part of organizational-wide role eliminations, CEO Andy Jassy announced in a statement on January 5, 2023. Given that Amazon employs 100,000 people in India, the 1,000 jobs that would be lost would account for 1% of all employment there. Jassy claims that the company disclosed its “painful choice” to eliminate many positions across its Devices and Books businesses in November. For a chosen number of PXT organisation employees, it also made a voluntary reduction offer. He also revealed the choice to eliminate 18,000 employees in 2023. Many teams will be impacted, but the PXT and Amazon Stores groups will see the majority of the roles terminated, he continued. The Amazon CEO continued by stating that although in theory the company would delay such statements until after speaking with anybody who might be impacted, the announcement had already been made as a result of an inside leak. He said the company would begin getting in touch with the impacted employees on January 18. “Normally, we hold off on discussing these results until we can get in touch with the people who will be directly impacted. But since one of our team members released this information to the outside world, we felt it would be preferable to break the news early so you could hear the specifics from me. Beginning on January 18, we plan to speak with affected workers (or, as appropriate in Europe, employee representation bodies),” said Jassy. Amazon has reported 18,000 job cuts, which are the company’s largest to date and more than other tech giants have disclosed, but the company still employs 1.5 million people worldwide, significantly more than any other internet company. Jassy says that Amazon has endured difficult and turbulent economies in the past and will do so in the future.

As the rollout of the high-speed service unleashes a “compounding impact” on recruiting for both non-niche skills and technical skills, NLB Services predicts that the 5G rollout will increase hiring in the telecom sector in 2023. The need for specialised telecom technology skills increased by approximately 20% in 2022 when compared to 2021, according to a statement from the global staffing and recruiting firm. It predicted that future recruiting demands will not be limited to the telecom industry alone. In order to expand up their service capabilities for 5G, NLB Services predicted that industries like healthcare, retail, manufacturing, and automotive would also look to hire tech talent. Among the most important job profiles in non-telecom sectors are data scientists and cybersecurity specialists. According to NLB Services, “In the last year, there has been a 15-20 per cent rise in demand for technology talent in the telecom and allied sectors, and the trend is expected to create a new record 25-30 per cent in the coming year.” Some of the most sought-after job roles at the moment earning roughly 10% to 12% better pay packages, according to the report, include cybersecurity, cloud computing, data science, and data analytics. It referred to 2022 as a “momentous year” for the Indian telecom industry as the 5G concept started to take shape and “green shoots in the job market.” “Leading telecom players have already rolled out 5G services in over 50 towns across India and are expected to cover most parts of the country in the next two years. This clearly indicates a compounding impact on hiring as well both for non-niche skills and technical skills,” it pointed out. NLB Services is a provider of transformative workforce solutions that was established in 2007.

The American multinational automotive and clean energy company Tesla is believed to have directed employees not to discuss salary and working conditions, and has thus been accused in violation of US labour laws. The maker of electric vehicles is accused of ordering its staff members not to bring complaints about their salary or other working conditions to the attention of senior managers. The staff are also requested not to talk about their salaries with others. The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has been notified of the complaint.  These incidents allegedly occurred between December 2021 and January 2022, according to the complaint. Additionally, it is said that Tesla has instructed its staff to keep hiring, suspending, and firing decisions confidential. The firing of two US-based Telsa employees who complained to the NLRB that they were wrongfully terminated for criticising Musk shows that the company does not appreciate criticism of Musk. According to other reports, two female employees of Twitter filed a class-action lawsuit against the company accusing it of breaching federal and state of California laws that forbid gender discrimination at work. 57% of female employees have been let go by Musk, compared to 47% of male employees. Other grievances against Twitter have also been filed with the NLRB.

With its one-time cash payout of 700 million dollars, the Walmart-owned e-commerce firm Flipkart would benefit at least 25,000 current and former employees, according to sources. As a result, Flipkart will become one of the most significant examples of wealth creation in India’s thriving start-up sector. Last week, Flipkart revealed that it would pay up to 700 million dollars in one-time discretionary cash payouts to over 25,000 of its past and current employees who hold employee stock options. The top 20 Flipkart employees, who were among the company’s first and most experienced employees, will receive up to 200 million dollars of the compensation, sources told Moneycontrol. One of the largest wealth-creation opportunities in the country has been provided by the private sector to date to Flipkart’s employees. Software giant Infosys led the way in employee stock programmes among publicly listed companies, rewarding non-founder employees with around 19% of outstanding equity, or roughly Rs 1.3 lakh crore.

The United Arab Emirates is expanding the Golden Visa programme in order to attract more workers. This includes scientists, researchers, and experienced people. The list of employees also includes eminent scholars and clerics, elite specialists in industry and the fourth industrial revolution, and experts in the fields of health and education. A long-term residence visa called the UAE Golden Visa allows foreigners with special talents to live, work, or study in the UAE. These advantages include a long-term renewable residence visa good for five or ten years, the benefit of not needing a sponsor, the opportunity to stay outside the UAE for longer than the standard period of six months while still maintaining their residence visa’s validity, the capacity to sponsor an infinite number of people, and the ability to sponsor their family members, including wives and children regardless of their ages. Workers who wish to apply for this UAE golden visa must possess an employment agreement that has been approved in the UAE and documentary evidence demonstrating that they hold a level 1 or level 2 occupation according to the MOHRE’s (Ministry of Human Resources & Emiratization) system of occupational classification. For jobs needing this employment certificate, a bachelor’s degree or an equivalent qualification must be attested. It is also necessary to submit a wage certificate from the employer together with a bank statement from the last six months showing a monthly salary of at least AED 30,000.

The NATO Building Integrity (NATO BI) initiative published the new Human Resource Management (HRM) toolkit for the public sector on October 24, 2022. The toolkit, created by the Norwegian Center for Integrity in the Defence Sector (CIDS), provides an interactive manual for fostering integrity in the public sector. It includes systematic planning manuals for human resources staff, employee questionnaires, and practical managerial competency assessments. The development of transparent, accountable, and democratic institutions depends on HRM. NATO BI aims to assist allies and partner nations on advancing good governance and putting these values into practise in the defence and related service sectors. According to NATO, effective HR management systems are essential to a well-functioning defence and security sector because they create leadership cultures that can be relied upon and trusted. Integrity building should be incorporated into every aspect of any institution, including job design, recruitment, and selection processes, as well as organisational culture. The newly created toolkit tries to create a link between organisational principles and practises in various circumstances. The HRM toolkit can now be used in compliance with NATO BI principles thanks to the publication of the “Glossary of Human Resource Management in the Public Sector.” Its goal is to support public sector employees and managers, as well as members of civil society organisations and the media, in creating institutional resilience. The toolkit will be made available in Arabic, Georgian, Ukrainian, and Spanish in addition to the two official languages of NATO (English and French).

Through an exchange filing on December 21, 2022, Tech Mahindra announced that it would issue employee stock options for shares valued Rs 7,58,450. A total of 1,51,690 equity shares worth Rs 5 each would be distributed across two ESOP 2014 and ESOP 2018 schemes. Following this new issue, 973,778,993 shares totaling Rs 4,868,894,665 have been issued. Earlier this month, the company announced its collaboration with Airtel to enable a private 5G network at Mahindra’s Chakan facility. On December 12, 2022, Tech Mahindra granted stock options worth more than 6 lakh rupees to its employees. On Wednesday, Tech Mahindra shares were up 0.91 percent at Rs 1,027.20. Tech Mahindra is part of the Mahindra Group. The company is based in Pune, while Mumbai serves as its registered office. It is a global provider of consulting and IT services based in India. More than 158,000 people work at Tech Mahindra in 90 different countries.