NEW DELHI: Call it Worse.com if you will. The CEO of US-based firm Better.com, Vishal Garg, laid off 900 employees during a bizarre Zoom call, shocking the company’s staff ahead of the festive season.
The sacked employees comprised about 9% of the digital mortgage lender. Reports said the lay-offs are mainly in India and the US, and that the Zoom call lasted just three minutes.
“I was working and my access went off,” a former employee of the company, who was laid off during the call, told this newspaper. The person, who had fixed nine hours of shift, feels cheated and devastated. “I was doing fine,” they said in a chat with the publication.
On the night of December 1, this person, who couldn’t attend the video call due to some technical issue, checked their mail as they were working and their access had gone off, only to receive the mail informing them about the layoffs.
“The internal team culture was very good but the administration ditched us,” they said on the condition of anonymity, adding this came out of the blue as there was no verbal or written warning.
The laid off workers, according to a former employee, will receive two months of notice period pay, one month severance pay, relieving letter and experience letter.
Garg, an abrasive executive, had once called his employees “a bunch of DUMB DOLPHINS” in a staff email.
TechCrunch speculated that the lay-offs may have been a condition for Better.com’s backers — which include SoftBank — greenlighting a sooner-than-expected cash infusion of $750 million.