One of the world’s biggest tech companies is about to become ‘leaner’, after Dell announced to its employees that it would be laying off further staff.
Just a few weeks after its workers expressed their dissatisfaction at Dell’s return to office policy, the company sent a memo to staff on Monday to notify them of the impending redundancies and cited the need for “streamlining layers of management”. It’s the second consecutive year that Dell has made significant cuts to its workforce.
The memo also alluded to Dell’s ambition to improve growth by further embracing AI technology within the organization.
Fewer Jobs, More Growth
The cull was originally reported by Bloomberg, after a memo sent out to staff was leaked. Addressed from Dell’s President of Global Sales and Customer Operations (Bill Scannell) and Global Channels President (John Byrne), it told employees that the company was getting “leaner” and that it is “streamlining layers of management and reprioritizing where we invest”.
Although the final number of layoffs has yet to be confirmed by Dell, it’s thought that in excess of 12,000 employees will be let go from the company – roughly 10% of its current workforce.
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The memo went on to justify the move by explaining that it was necessary in order to “grow faster than the market by seamlessly meeting our customers and partners online, virtually, or in person, to unlock the value of modern IT and AI for their organizations”.
“Through a reorganization of our go-to-market teams and an ongoing series of actions, we are becoming a leaner company.” – Dell spokesperson
Combining Teams and Prioritizing Investment
In follow-up correspondence with The Register, Dell again referred to the need to be “leaner” and said that it was looking to “continually evolve our business”.
It’s no great leap to assume that this evolution will be based around the use of AI. Dell has invested a great deal on AI technologies over the last year and expressly referred to its value in the memo.
“We are combining teams and prioritizing where we invest across the company,” it told The Register.
2024: The Year of the Layoff
It’s unlikely that too many Dell staff will be completely shocked by the executives’ decision to cull jobs. Last year, Dell made substantial cuts to its workforce, ultimately ditching over 10,000 jobs to bring its total number of employees down to around the 120,000-mark. And the company’s aggressive return to office policy was seen by many as intended to “thin the herd”.
If they weren’t indications enough, then anybody paying attention to the swathe of redundancies around the tech industry this year could have imagined that Dell might well be next.
It’s in prestigious company. Google kicked off 2024 with two rounds of job cuts, accounting for over 1,000 of its staff. Amazon did likewise, announcing hundreds of job losses across its healthcare units and around 500 dismissals from Twitch.
Since then, the likes of Mozilla, Cisco and Apple have all succumbed to job cuts, with Intel announcing a massive layoff of 15,000 employees only last week.
