Unsympathetic Leadership: Redundancies and Employee Disregard
Pros
The team I worked with were great
Cons
The founders display a complete lack of sympathy for their staff. In July, they laid off 19 employees, just one person shy of the collective redundancy threshold of 20 within 90 days. This allowed them to circumvent any formal redundancy process, which they indeed sidestepped. Fast forward 100 days, and they made an additional 9 staff members redundant. It was evident that they had planned this course of action earlier in the year but deliberately avoided the formal procedure. One would think we could have seen the signs, but there was absolutely no communication between July and October, except for one WhatsApp message regarding positive investor meetings (not so positive if they made more people redundant). Town Hall meetings, where the entire company gathered to discuss the business's performance, were abandoned until a week after the further redundancies were executed. A mere five days after being informed of the layoffs, we were still expected to report to the office on mandatory Tuesdays and Wednesdays. This wouldn't have been an issue if not for two critical factors. Firstly, we were left without any guidance on what tasks to focus on. The truly deplorable aspect was being instructed to prioritize office attendance on Tuesdays and Wednesdays over scheduling job interviews. Their lack of empathy for our situation was glaring; we were told to place the company that had discarded us ahead of securing new employment. All for what? To sit idly in the office, with no assigned tasks, appearing miserable while twiddling our thumbs?
