Vodafone staff braced for restructure news
Vodafone New Zealand staff are bracing for more restructure news ahead of an internal company update.
“A major round of redundancies coming up,” says one ex-senior staffer, who left the telco last year but maintains extensive contacts within the organisation.
The word is that hundreds of Vodafone NZ’s 2700 staff could see their roles axed, he said.
Yesterday a spokeswoman said there have been a number of updates to staff as Vodafone weighs infrastructure options and that another was scheduled for yesterday.
She said the meeting was to address potential changes to department heads and other staff who report directly to the executive.
There will be “some tough decisions about where we reduce investment to strengthen our commercial performance and create some freedom to invest in strategic priorities for the future”, she said.
She also stressed that no numbers had been finalised. The briefing was expected to stick to news about department heads.
Rank-and-file staff members will learn their fate “by the end of March”.
New chief executive Jason Paris has already made it plain that there will be belt-tightening in some areas — to free up funds for investment in others — as he prepares the business for an IPO next year.
“My remit is to get the business in shape over 2019 to list in 2020,” he told the Herald on November 10, just a week and a half into his new role.
“I’d like to see us on a better commercial trajectory before we list.”
And in an interview over the Christmas break, the Vodafone boss said: “The business hasn’t achieved the ambitious plans it set itself in 2018 so we are having to make some tough prioritisation calls at the moment. We need to speed up our innovation, decision making and delivery, and to simplify our products and experiences.
“We are not where we need to be from a commercial, customer experience or cultural perspective, and we are all focused on closing that gap.”
Earlier, Paris said he admired the “agile” philosophy employed during a recent Spark restructure, which saw the telco re-organise into small-cross, functional teams (and laid off a chunk of staff in the process as it shaved $48m from its wage bill).
He told the Herald it was likely Vodafone’s restructure would follow agile principles.
Vodafone NZ’s profit dropped from $7.7m to $39m last year on revenue that edged up $5.1m to $2 billion.