CEO Fires 900 Employees on Zoom Meeting
Dec. 8th, 2021 06:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
canyonwalkerLast week Better.com CEO Vishal Garg fired 900 employees over Zoom. "If you're on this call, you are part of the unlucky group that is being laid off," he said. "Your employment here is terminated effective immediately." Employees found their access to company software systems shut off shortly thereafter. Example news coverage: Better.com CEO fires 900 employees over Zoom, CNN.com article updated 6 Dec 2021.
Much of the media coverage I've read about this in the past few days has had a breathless nature to it. Breathless, as in reporters not understanding which parts of the story are actually unusual so they emphasize everything. Like, "A CEO fired people over Zoom! 900 people! Fired! Over Zoom!" That failure to understand happens, BTW, because most business articles are written by young 20-something writers. They lack the professional experience, and even the life experience, to put things in perspective.
From my perspective getting fired over Zoom would be nothing new. I've had remote managers, and thus remote employment reviews, for 10 years. I resigned from a job by telephone (we weren't really doing Zoom back then) 8 years ago. I was fired from a job (laid off) by phone 6 years ago. 4½ years ago I had a contentious performance review via phone. I tendered a resignation with 2 weeks notice, then the company dismissing me summarily. This was all via phone, not even Zoom. But the point is, getting fired (or quitting) without walking into the boss's office is hardly news.
What is news is how poorly Better.com CEO Garg handled this. A better approach would've been to convene a company all-hands meeting to announce there would be layoffs, followed by 1:1 conversations between employees and managers to confirm their status. That's basically a remote-working adaptation of the process I've gone through twice in major corporate layoffs that booted 30% of the companies. Better.com's layoff was 9% of its workforce.
Why didn't they do this? Almost certainly the answer is because it's expensive. It takes time. And Garg has a history of being a total jerkwad when it comes to cheaping out with employees. He's hounded them as "stealing" from their colleagues by only working "2 hours a day".
Another question is why nobody at the company, particularly nobody from HR, averted this disaster. There's 2 parts to the answer to that one, and basically both of them boil down to, because HR protects the company, not the employees. The first part is that a CEO like Garg with strong (stupid) beliefs is not going to hire/retain an HR exec who challenges him. He'll hire a toadie. And second, there are plenty of toadies out there. In Corporate America it's referred to as "Aligning with the business". That's a euphemism for supporting whatever the boss wants, whether it's fair, just, ethical, etc., or not. In HR that means things like sweeping sexual harassment allegations against key executives under the rug, as documenting and reporting them would be bad for the business. That's why sexual harassment is still such a problem in Corporate America even 30 years after HR started lecturing the rest of us on why it's wrong!
In the past few days a few Better.com executives have resigned. It looks like 2 PR heads and the VP Communication. Example news coverage: 3 Better.com executives resign after CEO lays off 900 over Zoom, CNN.com article 8 Dec 2021. Notably these are not HR leaders. They're external-facing PR people— people who, presumably, who don't want their PR careers tarnished as being the tools who defended Garg's ass-hat behavior. The tools in HR who approved it, supported it coordinated it, or at the very least enabled it, are still there.
Much of the media coverage I've read about this in the past few days has had a breathless nature to it. Breathless, as in reporters not understanding which parts of the story are actually unusual so they emphasize everything. Like, "A CEO fired people over Zoom! 900 people! Fired! Over Zoom!" That failure to understand happens, BTW, because most business articles are written by young 20-something writers. They lack the professional experience, and even the life experience, to put things in perspective.
From my perspective getting fired over Zoom would be nothing new. I've had remote managers, and thus remote employment reviews, for 10 years. I resigned from a job by telephone (we weren't really doing Zoom back then) 8 years ago. I was fired from a job (laid off) by phone 6 years ago. 4½ years ago I had a contentious performance review via phone. I tendered a resignation with 2 weeks notice, then the company dismissing me summarily. This was all via phone, not even Zoom. But the point is, getting fired (or quitting) without walking into the boss's office is hardly news.
What is news is how poorly Better.com CEO Garg handled this. A better approach would've been to convene a company all-hands meeting to announce there would be layoffs, followed by 1:1 conversations between employees and managers to confirm their status. That's basically a remote-working adaptation of the process I've gone through twice in major corporate layoffs that booted 30% of the companies. Better.com's layoff was 9% of its workforce.
Why didn't they do this? Almost certainly the answer is because it's expensive. It takes time. And Garg has a history of being a total jerkwad when it comes to cheaping out with employees. He's hounded them as "stealing" from their colleagues by only working "2 hours a day".
Another question is why nobody at the company, particularly nobody from HR, averted this disaster. There's 2 parts to the answer to that one, and basically both of them boil down to, because HR protects the company, not the employees. The first part is that a CEO like Garg with strong (stupid) beliefs is not going to hire/retain an HR exec who challenges him. He'll hire a toadie. And second, there are plenty of toadies out there. In Corporate America it's referred to as "Aligning with the business". That's a euphemism for supporting whatever the boss wants, whether it's fair, just, ethical, etc., or not. In HR that means things like sweeping sexual harassment allegations against key executives under the rug, as documenting and reporting them would be bad for the business. That's why sexual harassment is still such a problem in Corporate America even 30 years after HR started lecturing the rest of us on why it's wrong!
In the past few days a few Better.com executives have resigned. It looks like 2 PR heads and the VP Communication. Example news coverage: 3 Better.com executives resign after CEO lays off 900 over Zoom, CNN.com article 8 Dec 2021. Notably these are not HR leaders. They're external-facing PR people— people who, presumably, who don't want their PR careers tarnished as being the tools who defended Garg's ass-hat behavior. The tools in HR who approved it, supported it coordinated it, or at the very least enabled it, are still there.
