Don't be a Garg

Who lays off 900 people via Zoom a few weeks before Christmas and then complains about it being hurtful for themselves?

Ohh, the CEO of Better.com Vishal Garg.

Let’s count some of the ways that this was handled SO badly.

1)????Large Zoom call

I understand that laying off 900 people is a daunting task. Having individual conversations would have been impossible. When you do the math, each conversation takes, at minimum 5-15 minutes. That would have taken more than a full day, starting at 8 am and continuing into the evening, leaving hundreds of people waiting hours, and hours for terrible news. However, there are better ways than telling everyone at once and then shutting down their systems.

Garg said that he wants to “own” the message. Let me tell you, when you’re on the receiving end of the message you don’t give a flying &^%# who owns the message. All that matters is that someone who isn’t you is going to continue to get paid while you scramble to make sense of what is happening, hearth thumping and panicking about how you will pay your bills next month.

Everyone on that call had a manager. They most likely all got along much better with their manager than they did the CEO. The hubris displayed by a CEO during that call, making him the focus of the pain, would certainly not have happened if each manager had been allowed to tell their team what was happening.

2)????Small Severance

I have been on both sides of the layoff during the holiday equation. It feels disgusting when you are delivering the news and it can feel downright fatal when you are receiving the news. Contrary to popular belief, the holidays have a lower average number of suicide deaths per day so let’s try to keep it that way. The one opportunity for grace that a company has in this situation, besides notifying people with dignity, is providing a soft landing. That would be giving everyone enough severance to get someone through the holidays and find an even better job in the new year, which is said to be a great time to look for a new job. According to the recording I saw, the 900 employees will get 30 days of severance.

30 days of severance, while it may seem super generous to the company giving it, sucks. In this instance, it’s not like they were told last week and would stay on payroll through December, then get a month of severance to carry everyone through January. They were told, basically, you get 2 more paychecks. 40% of people with an annual income of over 100k live paycheck-to-paycheck. So looking at those numbers, 360 people may be on the brink of homelessness this time next month.

I’m no angel and I’m selfish AF but when it came down to me and the company I was working for closing its doors, I took a 30% pay cut. If just the CEO, Garg, did that for just one month, every single one of those 900 people could have had at least $700 more in their severance package. That might not seem like a lot but what if everyone in the C-suite did that? If I can do that, I’m pretty sure someone making millions of dollars a year can do it.

3)????Timing

I mean really???? The timing wasn’t even good for letting people know not to go overboard for Christmas. Think about it. Most families couldn’t get together last year so there are so very, many people planning to go all out this year, a year when even Christmas dinner is going to cost more than it did last year. Any excuse given for why employees couldn’t have been notified earlier is BS and centered around landing more money, which in and of itself should have meant that this notification didn’t have to happen.

?There are many, many more things that I could continue to say about how poorly this was done. But I’m going to stop there and focus on some of the positives.

1)????LinkedIn seems like it is really coming through for these people, as well as the people who were laid off by Zillow last week. I have seen an outpouring of recruiters offering to review resumes and sending links for open roles.

2)????I’ve heard multiple leaders say that what happened there was DEAD WRONG. That’s encouraging to hear. I am truly hoping that this is a life lesson for other leaders so that this never happens again.

3)????There is a LOT of other info that came out about Vishal Garg, including him calling people dumb dolphins and saying that 250 of the people laid off weren’t working 8 hours a day. This puts him squarely on the Do Not Work With or For list and I’m always happy to add names to that list.

Other than that, there’s nothing good that I can say about a POS that puts people through one of the worst times of their lives during the holidays, just as things were starting to get better for so many people.

That’s my rant, folks.

Oh, if you’re a CEO and you’re thinking about doing anything remotely close to this. Don’t. Call me instead and I’m sure we can find a better solution.?