Flipkart may handover pink slips to nearly 700 employees

India’s largest online marketplace Flipkart is acting tough on its underperforming employees and has asked them to put in their papers, else they will be terminated and given severance pay.

This decision by Flipkart, which has nearly 30,000 employees, is likely to affect 700 to 1,000 staff.

"The cleanup is a part of the process of making Flipkart a lean organisation," ET quoted one of the sources as saying.

Apparently, this is not the first time Flipkart has come down heavily on its non-performing employees.

Flipkart, in a statement, said “In situations where employees do not make progress despite being put on a performance improvement plan, they are encouraged to seek opportunities outside the company where their skills can be better utilised. This is a fairly common practice across various industries- especially in high performing internet organisations.”

Not only Flipkart, even Snapdeal is looking to do away with non-performing employees and recently as many as 200 people were asked to buckle up or move out.

ET quoted a former Flipkart employee saying how roles and expectations kept changing.

"I chose to resign and sent a formal mail to my manager, which was immediately accepted. While the company has been patient with its employees over the last four years, this time it was not," this person told ET. He had worked for three years in the company in several roles, with the last one in the marketplace division.

"Managers should have good facts and data substantiating why a particular person is a non-performer, and base his decision on factual data. There is also a lot of referencing that happens in this space and an organisation should be helping them in that regard as well," Harish Kumar, Managing Partner at Wenger & Watson, told ET.

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