Metricon will shed 225 staff nationally as part of an internal restructure just months after founder Mario Biasin died and acting chief executive Peter Langfelder said contracts were profitable.
NSW sales staff learned about the 9 per cent cut to the company-wide workforce and that their team would be reduced to 18 people in an announcement during a Microsoft Teams meeting this week with a confidential summary circulated to all staff afterwards.
Metricon NSW sales manager David Shorten also told the then 60-person team that 15 trainee sales consultants would also lose their jobs with no chance of redeployment.
“To better accommodate and reflect the requirements of the current market and ensure the most appropriate deployment of resources, we have undertaken an important review of the sales team,” Shorten said.
Staff were told that the company management would be looking for redundancies in order to internally restructure the company to allow it to move forward.
Affected employees were also told that they had until noon on Wednesday (August 3) to offer any feedback and thoughts on the proposed structure and that staff would know by the end of the week if they were being made redundant.
Staff who did not accept new roles were not guaranteed redeployment elsewhere or redundancy payments.
Some staff had an inkling an announcement had been in the works as the company’s HR portal had shut down the previous week.
Langfelder confirmed later on Tuesday that a consultation process with affected staff to move towards redundancies had begun.
Most of the staff cut will be in sales and marketing roles. Langfelder said he was confident that Metricon would have 6000 new home starts next year and stay on track to sign 100 contracts a week.
Biasin died in May aged 71 after confirming that contracts would be renegotiated after complaints to The Urban Developer that Metricon wasn’t honouring contracts.
There were also rumours that staff had been told that it was ‘crunch time’ and that sub-contractors were not showing up for work.
Langfelder insisted that everything was fine though but admitted the company had felt the effects of the pandemic saying ‘the media was not helping’.
Metricon’s owners went on to inject $30 million into the company while the Commonwealth Bank approved a 100 per cent increase to its working capital facility.
The Victorian government has $195-million worth of projects with the company.
Metricon had 6052 new home starts in the 2021 financial year, up 33 per cent from 4534 in the 2020 financial year.
The company benefited from several government schemes during the pandemic including the Homebuilder scheme.
At the time of Biasin’s death, it had more than 4000 homes under construction.
