OCTOBER 4, 2023 — 780 EMPLOYEES GONE
The company has announced that it is restructuring its organization and reducing its headcount by 14% to reduce costs and reduce the company’s internal complexity created by its past hiring and growth.
From the company’s CEO…
We’ve been on an incredible growth trajectory over the past five years. Today, Qualtrics is the leader in XM with more than 20,000 global customers. We have tremendous momentum, and we’re still only at the beginning of our journey.
Against that backdrop, we've now come to a day that is painful, but also necessary to achieve our next phase of growth at scale. We’ve made the difficult decision to eliminate approximately 780 roles across the company. Additionally, several hundred roles are changing or moving locations over the next year. In doing so, we will comply with all local consultation requirements related to these changes.
Every employee will soon receive an invitation to join a specific Zoom meeting where we will share your status and next steps. We know this is a tough day — please feel free to work from home if you can.
These are big changes. There’s no way around it. They will directly impact many amazing and talented teammates and friends who we care deeply about, and these changes will impact all of us.
So, how did we get here?
Rapid hiring was essential to enable our growth up to this point, but it also created complexity that does not support continued growth at our scale. Simply put, the organizational structures, work processes and the way we made decisions previously don’t work for the company we’ve become, or the company we aspire to be.
The changes we’re making—which touch every team at the company—are necessary for us to capture the massive opportunity in front of us given our significant market momentum and the mission critical nature of our XM platform. To get here, we conducted a deep review of every function in the company.
The result is an organizational structure that will enable our teams to work better together, bring new innovations to market faster, and make it easier for our customers and partners to do business with us.
While these changes are important to Qualtrics' future, they are not easy. And we are going to support teammates who are affected.
Many talented people are leaving Qualtrics today. I’m confident their skills will be in high demand, and we're also providing career services to help them find their next role as quickly and easily as possible.
To those who are leaving, I am truly sorry. I know this explanation doesn’t make it any better for you. On behalf of the entire company, thank you for everything you’ve given to Qualtrics, and for the chapters you have helped to write. We are committed to supporting you through this change.
To those who are continuing with Qualtrics to write our next chapters, I am also incredibly grateful. These are hard changes. They hurt, and they affect a lot of people we care about.
And to everyone, as we tackle this difficult day together, thank you for your resilience and commitment to our customers, partners and each other. There are better days ahead for all of us.
FEBRUARY 3, 2023 — Original post…
Seattle, Washington-based Qualtrics, a customer and employee experience tracking company, has announced a 5% reduction in headcount.
The reduction in force will impact 270 employees.
CEO Zig Serafin noted...
"Being able to adapt to dynamic markets and changing customer needs will be more critical than ever in this coming year. How we focus through this is critical to achieving our goals."
"And as a result, we're now aligning resources to these highest priorities. This involves making difficult decisions, including creating some new roles, restructuring current roles and eliminating some roles that do not map to priority areas."
"After careful consideration, we have made the difficult decision to eliminate approximately 270 roles globally across the company, which is less than 5% of our workforce. We are in the process of notifying employees whose roles have either been eliminated or are at risk of redundancy, and expect to have all conversations completed by the end of this week."
"We recognize that this change will impact almost everyone at Qualtrics, our friends and colleagues who'll be departing as well as the broader team. The leadership team and I are here to support all of you."
"I’m deeply grateful to each person who has contributed to building Qualtrics. While this is an incredibly difficult moment, these are steps we need to take to support how we build the company going forward and to deliver results against our goals."
It gets worse…
German software company SAP acquired Qualtrics for $8 billion in 2019 and listed the company on the stock exchange in 2021, SAP said it was seeking a buyer for Qualtrics XM International Inc., which makes software for businesses to track customer interactions, brands, and employees, a relatively new field that insiders call “experience management.”
Change is coming. There will always be a tomorrow, no matter how much you may try to ignore it. There are no guarantees in life or promises for a bright future. We see good people being laid off through no fault of their own. Just because something bad hasn't happened yet, doesn't mean it won't. It can happen to anyone, anytime, anywhere. No one is guaranteed to wake up tomorrow and still have a job by evening. Are you now wondering, Am I Next?