About 900 employees of real estate company Better.com were asked to attend a Zoom call on Wednesday. But rather than offering a holiday message to workers, CEO Vishal Garg delivered a 3-minute speech informing attendees they were "terminated effectively immediately."
He said staff performance and productivity, and market changes lay behind the mass-firing of what he said was 15% of Better.com's workforce. However, he did not mention the $750m cash infusion Better.com received last week from Softbank, the Japanese firm and key investor.
Garg founded Better.com in 2016 with the mission of
simplifying the mortgage-buying process
Better is now in the process of going public
via a special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC, in a deal that would value
the company at about $7 billion.
Soon after the mass layoff last week, Garg held a separate phone call with the remaining staff in which he blamed himself for managerial problems. "Today, we acknowledge that we overhired and hired the wrong people, and in doing that, we failed," Garg said, according to Insider. "I failed. I was not disciplined over the last 18 months.”
It is hard to say whether Garg is a good leader. One of Garg’s emails to his employees was widely criticised for its “rude" nature. It said “You are TOO DAMN SLOW. You are a bunch of DUMB DOLPHINS and… DUMB DOLPHINS get caught in nets and eaten by sharks. SO STOP IT. STOP IT. STOP IT RIGHT NOW. YOU ARE EMBARRASSING ME.”
There's no great way to lay people off, but there's a way to do it and this wasn’t it.
First, there’s the timing: three weeks before
Christmas. And then the whole thing was handled over Zoom. Maybe that was
unavoidable, but the process was made even less personal by having everyone
crammed into one virtual room for a single, brief meeting.
It could harm the firm as existing employees will look to how the company treats people as a
signal to how it will treat them in the future.
Many customers or potential customers are probably thinking: 'Gee, if they treat
their employees this way I wonder how they treat their customers?'."
Sometimes bad press is just bad press. And by carrying out one of the laziest, worst-timed layoffs ever, Better.com's executives have everyone talking about their company for all the wrong reasons.
From CBSNews (edited)
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