Undoubtedly, by now you've heard this story (via the New York Times):
Better.com’s mercurial chief executive, Vishal Garg, faced swift backlash for his decision to fire more than 900 employees on a Zoom call last week. The mortgage lender’s board announced in a memo sent to staff on Friday that Mr. Garg was “taking time off” after the “very regrettable events.”
“I come to you with not great news,” Mr. Garg had said to about 9 percent of his staff, in a recording since shared widely online. “If you’re on this call you are part of the unlucky group that is being laid off. Your employment here is terminated effective immediately.”
Something that bothers me about this (and likely why the CEO has been put on leave) is that someone within this organization thought that a mass firing via Zoom was an acceptable idea. Bluntly speaking, that's pretty shocking; someone with some amount of humanity or should have recognized it as A Bad Idea.
The other thing that I am really bothered by is that Mr. Garg was clearly extemporizing what he was saying to these employees. Not that a prepared speech would have made it better, but not taking the 3 minutes to plan out remarks speaks to his judgment as well.
Times are good in private sector chemistry employment right now, and at some point, the Fed will take away the punch bowl, and the layoffs will start. There is no good way to perform a layoff, but the remote mass layoff is a bad one, and I hope that it will not enter the chemical/pharmaceutical industry.
Best wishes to the laid-off employees of Better, and best wishes to all of us.
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looks like Blogger doesn't work with anonymous comments from Chrome browsers at the moment - works in Microsoft Edge, or from Chrome with a Blogger account - sorry! CJ 3/21/20