Merry Christmas, from Better.com to you and yours!
Imagine waking up on Monday morning and learning that you and 899 other employees are being terminated via a last-minute Zoom call.
"I come to you with not great news," CEO Vishal Garg said at the beginning of the Dec. 1 meeting, according to a recording of the call posted to TikTok.
"We are laying off about 15 percent of the company for a number of reasons — the market efficiency and performances, and productivity," he said.
"If you're on this call, you are part of the unlucky group that is being laid off," Garg continued. "Your employment here is terminated effective immediately."
Here's video:
Look, I get it: Companies sometimes have to make hard decisions because of a variety of legitimate decisions.
But imagine laying off 15% of your workforce a few weeks before Christmas OVER ZOOM and somehow thinking that's okay. Peeps didn't even get a two-week notice! At least they were decent enough to give a severance through the end of the year.
The way in which Garg chose to fire hundreds of people was jarring, the former employee said.
"It seemed like he could have a had a better way to go about it," he said. "Maybe in individual rooms with HR people."
You think?
This sounds like something The Office's Michael Scott would do.
Don't fire people en masse over a scripted Zoom call, bro!!
Garg founded the company in 2014 "with the goal of re-engineering the mortgage process," according to Better.com's website. Garg wanted to make home buying faster, easier and less expensive.
He has faced controversy before. In an email to employees obtained by Forbes last year, he wrote: "You are TOO DAMN SLOW. You are a bunch of DUMB DOLPHINS and…DUMB DOLPHINS get caught in nets and eaten by sharks. SO STOP IT. STOP IT. STOP IT RIGHT NOW. YOU ARE EMBARRASSING ME."
