You’re fired: The worst Zoom layoff ever
The chief executive of a $7.7 billion tech startup demonstrated how not to handle laying off 900 employees, said Elisha Fieldstadt in NBCNews.com. “I come to you with not great news,” began Vishal Garg, CEO of the digital mortgage lender Better.com, on a hastily organized, three-minute Zoom call last week with 9 percent of his staff. “This is the second time in my career I’m doing this,” Garg said. “The last time I did it I cried. This time, I hope to be stronger.” With his feelings out of the way, Garg announced that everybody on the call was being laid off “effective immediately.” What made the timing—weeks before the holidays—even worse is that Better.com was still celebrating “a $750 million cash infusion from its backers” that arrived a day earlier.
“There are few good ways to lay off a bunch of people,” said Mark Gongloff in Bloomberg.com, but Better.com found one of the worst ways ever. Better.com can take its place in the pantheon of legends with “Patch.com’s conference-call firing in 2014 and RadioShack’s layoff email in 2006.” The Zoom call was one thing. Garg then later confirmed to Fortune that he was the author of several anonymous blog posts on a Silicon Valley professional network accusing the laid-off workers of “stealing” by “working an average of 2 hours a day.” The blowback to his handling of the layoff was so severe that days later Garg announced that he’d be taking time off himself, effective immediately.
In person is best for delivering bad news, said Suzanne Lucas in Inc .com, but if it must be via Zoom,
“it needs to be one-on-one or small groups at the most.” Each of these 900 employees had a manager. “The manager should be the one to deliver the news, one-on-one.” With a mass videoconference, how did Better.com even verify that everyone was there? Catching employees off guard is also not recommended, said Jeanne Sahadi in CNN .com. Shocking people “while they’re in the kitchen or within earshot of their kids or spouse is more personally invasive than doing it in an office.”
This isn’t the last Zoom firing, said Charles Passy in Market Watch.com. “It may seem harsh,” but just as hiring is conducted remotely these days, layoffs are, too. It would be “even more awkward asking remote employees to come in to the office just to hit them with a pink slip.” Deborah Copaken, who wrote last year about her own experience losing a job over Zoom, said Better.com’s approach was “largely irrelevant.” What’s more important is “passing the empathy test.” “It doesn’t matter what medium you’re using if the person delivering the message is an a--hole,” Copaken said.