“Before the Spring Festival, we are only the second round of layoffs, and there will be a third round after the year, depending on the situation.”
On the first day of the lunar new year, Liu Fang, the manpower boss of a top20 real estate enterprise, said in an interview with the reporter of the daily economic news, “everyone is laying off staff. This is the general trend, so he accepted his fate.”
Due to the relationship between the epidemic situation and epidemic prevention policies, Liu Fang chose to celebrate the new year in Shanghai. Because the assessment indicators of her department are the most important of the group, it is necessary to optimize the indicators of all departments of the group within the specified time, and sort out the personnel reduction figures of this year.
“The HR boss also has his own concerns. In fact, a stroke of a pen is not as open and close as everyone thinks.” Liu Fang said that before the year, he was worried that the indicators could not be completed. After the year, he was most worried about the loss of personnel. “What he was afraid of was that the people you wanted to stay couldn’t stay, but the people you didn’t want to stay stayed.”.
There may be a third round of layoffs in years
Other departments had a holiday long before the Spring Festival, while the human resources department in charge of Liu Fang stuck to it until new year’s Eve.
“On the one hand, layoffs are to improve efficiency, especially the layoffs years ago, which can also greatly save costs. Of course, this is the general trend. When there are big rivers, they will accept their fate.”
Liu Fang told the reporter of the daily economic news that in the context of the overall downturn of the industry, for many real estate enterprises, “surviving”, “ensuring the delivery of buildings” and ensuring the basic operation of the company are the most important, and the reasonable allocation of company personnel is the “No. 1” work focus of the human resources department.
“Before the Spring Festival, we are only the second round of layoffs, and there will be a third round after the year, depending on the situation.”
Liu Fang’s real estate enterprise is similar to Tahoe Group Co.Ltd(000732) , China Fortune Land Development Co.Ltd(600340) , Sichuan Languang Development Co.Ltd(600466) and other real estate enterprises that have exploded before. Due to the capital fracture caused by factors such as rapid expansion, hundreds of projects under the real estate enterprise were once closed or semi closed, resulting in a steep decline in sales recently.
The reporter noted that enterprises that have expanded through high leverage and high turnover in recent years, including Yango Group Co.Ltd(000671) , Xinli and Hongyang, have successively reported layoffs in the past two years. For example, Yango Group Co.Ltd(000671) the marketing regions under its jurisdiction will be abolished and merged in mid January this year; Hongyang real estate reported 30% layoffs as early as 2020.
Liu Fang told reporters that the “improvement of quality and efficiency” proposed by real estate enterprises is to reduce some levels or departments in the organizational structure, cut high recruitment and low recruitment in the human resource mouth, reduce costs in the marketing mouth, and reduce costs in the operation mouth. Whether the project should be pressed or not will be pressed for a few more months.
“With the interruption of financing cash flow and operating cash flow of such real estate enterprises, property buyers are also more cautious. They dare not buy their houses for real estate enterprises that are about to explode. Unless the financing side is relaxed, it will be difficult for such enterprises to get back to this situation.”
“big white rabbit” and “little white rabbit” become the focus of layoffs
Who are the most likely candidates for layoffs? In Liu Fang’s view, for a real estate enterprise, it only needs to leave the engineering, cost, marketing, finance and human resources departments to operate.
\u3000\u3000 “When the market is good, real estate enterprises hope to set up marketing companies outside the marketing center. In addition to doing marketing strategies, their functions overlap with regional marketing departments and group marketing centers. Their original intention is to do an incubation, not only sell their own house, but also want to become a channel to sell other people’s new houses. However, if the market is bad, this department will become a burden, high or low, which is also difficult Is the logic of why Yango Group Co.Ltd(000671) will abolish this department. “
Liu Fang said that the value of the organizational departments of real estate enterprises lies in the full cooperation of all lines. Therefore, the order of layoffs is investment, customer research, financing, etc. For people on regional platforms and group platforms, they can also choose. For example, Yango Group Co.Ltd(000671) , after the merger of Shanghai and Jiangsu, only a small number of front-line personnel will be left.
In addition to the abolition, retention and consolidation of the whole department, it is relatively cautious about the fate of personnel in the Department, which is also the most troublesome part for the HR manager.
Generally speaking, layoffs will be targeted at employees in all functional areas of the group, especially management positions. Secondly, marketing posts are the hardest hit areas. In particular, some marketing departments at the end of the market will be merged into other projects, and about half of them will be “optimized”.
“The first is the ‘old white rabbit’, who is old and doesn’t do it by himself. Most of them are senior managers and deputy directors of the Department. Such people usually have a lot of relationships in the company. The first wave is this kind of people. The second wave is the ‘little white rabbit’ who has just been in the industry for a year or two. This kind of people are willing to do things, but can’t undertake tasks independently.”
The third wave is the management personnel, such as the regional marketing director, who can let the group’s marketing manager concurrently. Management posts can be compressed through part-time work. Management posts are not business posts, but achieve business results through management objectives and others. People who manage this post do not have so high requirements for professionalism.
“Finally, there are business backbones with many years of work experience and strong execution. Such people ‘live’ the longest.”
However, cost reduction is on the one hand. Liu Fang said, “if you can sell your house well, the enterprise is willing to add money to find someone, and the increased input depends on his output. At this stage, all actions focus on one goal, that is, delivery on time.”
“In the past, in order to expand, enterprises implemented three-level control. Now for most real estate enterprises, what they need to do is penetration management and do the most efficient thing at the lowest cost. In terms of organizational structure, it is basically reduced to two-level control, and penetration + flat management is the general trend. The group directly managed the region through regional integration, making the regional platform no longer important.”
In addition, at this stage of marketing, real estate enterprises will more adopt the way of distribution and increasing the proportion of commission. “The input and output of human resources need a time limit. It doesn’t mean that if you recruit people today, it will be effective next month. It will take at least half a year. After all, real estate enterprises are not assembly line factories.”
In Liu Fang’s view, there may not be a difference between 20 person sales and 40 person sales in a case, and 20 real estate consultants may not have customers. “Unless there is an influx of buyers on the project, additional manpower is needed.”
you have to survive before you can live well
“We must survive first, then we can survive, and finally we can live well. To survive is to withstand the storm and continue to operate at the same time, and then we can consider taking a step forward.”
Liu Fang said that the situation of each real estate enterprise is different and its attributes are different, so the current situation is also different. In the stage of survival, it is necessary to identify which regions are the basic disk and which departments need to be maintained. At the same time, for the functions and regions that can be abandoned at this stage, we should sell them and shrink the organizational structure.
“Although we are facing the same situation, the mentality of different real estate enterprises before the Spring Festival is not the same.”
For real estate enterprises such as country garden, Longhu and Xuhui, they will still maintain a steady development strategy, including talent organization. For example, Longhu is currently in a personnel change cycle. In the past decade, Longhu has rapidly introduced industry elites and trained a large number of official students since 2012. Now these people have become the mainstay of the enterprise.
“When the industry is faced with a large reduction in staff, it is faced with its own replacement needs. After all, some people can’t keep up with the development of the enterprise. At this time, take advantage of the situation to change positions, eliminate those who can’t keep up, and recruit a group of good people from other real estate enterprises.”
In addition, it is an excellent opportunity for some Chinese real estate enterprises to expand, which is similar to Vanke’s former position.
Real estate enterprises such as Gezhouba and power construction have sufficient thickness in business ability and talent construction, and will expand the market scale through project mergers and acquisitions, but their corresponding organizational structure will not expand rapidly, regional platforms will not recruit people on a large scale, and they will only fill some key positions in civil engineering and projects.
Another example is the construction and development of regional state-owned enterprises, HUAFA, etc. on the one hand, these real estate enterprises want to undertake some regional projects of real estate enterprises. The demand for talents and expansion is the most intense. On the talent side, they will take a more radical way to achieve a leap of 50 billion to 100 billion yuan.
There are also regional real estate enterprises such as Guangxi zhangtai, Henan Jianye and Sichuan territory, as well as enterprises that have not landed in the capital market and have not used enough leverage. The new year situation faced by these two types of enterprises is different.
At the important node of the Spring Festival, what kind of salary strategy is used to ensure people’s hearts? Liu Fang said, “we will distribute the retained cadres in a tendentious way, and make special adjustments to some places that need to shrink.”
(at the request of the interviewer, Liu Fang is a pseudonym in the text)
