Without providing enough detail to OUT my identity, suffice it to say that I'm close to a team that has the task of providing what I'll call a "widget" to every employee of WF by Q1 2022.
These "widgets" are not cheap trinkets. They're a piece of gear that every individual is going to need to access the network next year. It's not an option to NOT give every employee one widget.
Problem is that the cost of each "widget" recently (and unexpectedly) increased, and now the total cost of all these "widgets" (one for each employee) exceeds the budget by a LOT.
We were told that we MUST buy these, but now we can't because the cost numbers have become too high. So our leadership asked for more money so we could purchase one widget per employee (and here's the important part) based on the number of employees we had been given.
We have now been told that "at the end of 2021 we should now plan to need only 200,000 widgets". This didn't come from some manager - this came from a high-up executive in HR or Finance (I don't know which one).
It didn't sound like something that was willingly shared with us. The vibe I got was that they didn't want to tell us this at all, but they had to for the sake of keeping the purchase under a certain dollar figure.
The room got really quiet when we were told that. Everyone there knew what it meant
Now to be honest, nobody said anything about HOW that 200,000 number was going to be reached. I don't know how many people will get layoffs. Certainly some. And it's also certain that there will be normal attrition between now and then. How much? I don't know.
I'm just telling you all what I heard, and that some higher-ups expect the number of employees here to be around 200,000 in the not too distant future.