There are certain things that should be done in a healthy company. It's hard to turn them into an algorithm, but they can be called at least.
Make transparent and regular feedbacks with your subordinates and manager. And during those feedback meetings bring up all possible conflicts. Discuss them. Break down into elements. And solve. Ignored and unsolved professional conflicts with matter of time become personal and turn all work into a toxic swamp.
Declare transparent borders between responsibilities of the employees. So thay they would be able to understand until which point they need to work, and where - to stop and delegate to someone else.
Do not make promises that you cannot keep. Better to keep your mouth shut than say dozens of empty promises.
Make clear goals and objectives. If you cannot - admit it and ask for help.
Listen to your subordinates.
Give people transparent possibility to escalate the problem if it's not solved.
Give clear definition of what is good in the company and truly, honestly reward people for improvements.
Make clear and honest conversation with the team if the company needs layoffs. Make it an official procedure with defined criteria of the layoff. And stick to them.
--------
BostonGene, which tries to look like a grown-up corporation, is still a startup. It does not have transparent revenue sources. It does not have defined processes. It does not have healthy corporate culture. And it somehow manages to spoil and ruin every single element listed above. And still tries to look nice.
Culture of regular feedbacks is literally absent. HR people literally do not understand importance of this procedure, and do not do it unless they are forced by regular managers. This leads to omnipresent personal conflicts.
HR's are not trying to see and resolve conflicts between people. Even worse - HR's are exploiting these conflicts in their own interest, undermining trust into people and into company. With quite rare exceptions. This leads to the situation where not most talented people would thrive, but those, who know how to lie and make a good face expression.
Company keeps on hiring people with average age of 23-27, with almost zero experience of corporate work, and low entry salary. Instead of giving them culture of grown-ups and obtaining grown-up mindset, it keeps on just sending them onto tasks. And once they start realizing how bad the things are - instead of solving problems - it solves the people, essentially firing them. Or making them close their mouth, threatening them with firing.
The layoff procedure done at August 2024 is completely outrageous. Instead of making an official layoff of the desired amount of people with transparent criteria, the company started 'negotiations' with people, putting it into the plain of 'mutual agreements'. Essentially this leads to the situation where people are leaving, leaving massively, but this is officially not a layoff, and does not demand notification to the Armenian Ministry of Labor. This is not a violation of the law. But this is a very bad sign, underlining that the company avoids taking any responsibility for the true layoffs.
The 'negotiations' were done in very fancy fashion. With cases where initially meeting was called 'about your promotion', and starting the meeting itself with 'your actual layoff'. Meaning that the HR were exploiting the surprise effect on the employees in order to force non-beneficial agreement clauses.
People with remote work who refused to sign such 'agreement' were threatened to be dismissed 'for cause', where the cause would be absence on the working place. And yes, BostonGene has quite non-transparent relationships with remote work, which can be exploited by the employer. And this is not strictly a violation of the law. But still a miserable practice.
The CEO of the company instead of making an official announcement about layoffs... just waits for 2 weeks. When the main mass is already forced to leave (yes, all layoffs were done in silence, without official announcements). And makes a wonderful speech for an audience of 300 people... about planned consolidation of the team. And that all the layoffs were done based on perfomance review and importance of the projects. Taking into account that there's no feedback culture in BostonGene - all talks about layoffs based on perfomance review... are a lie.
The previous paragraph essentially means. That the dismisses could be done not on the base of perfomance or projects' importance. But on the personal preferences of certain people. Which becomes 10 times worse if you take into account omnipresent personal conflicts.
Let me remind that this is the company that literally ASKED the Moscow office to relocate to Yerevan in 2022 (it's a quote, and not a rephrase of the CEO). After 2 years of non-transparent policy of projects' prioirities and ratio between product and R&D... the company fires 25% of people (~100 people) in Armenia. Into a market with no employment in precision oncology. And the choice of either return to Russia (with risk of getting the draft card to the war), or the hard way of even further emigration.
And also keep in mind that laws of Armenia are all written in Armenian, while the best part of layoffed people are Russian. Hence, they literally cannot read their own right without help in Armenia.
To make things even worse - company had several occations of blatant conflict of interests when people were promoted to a manager position and given scientific manuscript first authorship not based on their contribution, but based on their relationships. Which was overlooked by top management. And made work at BostonGene as toxic as possible.
-----------------------------------
In the end of the day, while being at Moscow office, BostonGene raised many questions, but this still was somehow acceptable.
Right now it becomes worse and worse every single day.
The worst thing about this is that the CEO doesn't seem to be receptive to the criticizm. He just wishes to get as much money as possible. But does not provide the plan. And changes the plan in random moments of time.
