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What the heck is going on with a company firing 900 people over a zoom call?
Brian’s thoughts on communication or the lack thereof.
Transcription
Mass zoom firing, the real problem.
Hi I’m Brian Pombo, welcome back to Brian J. Pombo Live.
How would you like to be this poor son of a gun, this CEO of better.com.
And he fired 900 people in a very unusual way. He got them all on zoom at the same time, and just did it in one fell swoop.
Now, anybody who’s a business owner or executive, I mean, I know everybody felt sorry for the people that got fired.
Honestly, I’ve always lost my largest clients or got fired from positions. I don’t think I ever got let go from anything, that wasn’t right before Christmas.
I mean, it always happens that way.
It’s always right before or right near the holidays, and it just seems to be a common time. I don’t really know why that is but that doesn’t surprise me.
The fact that they lost their job. That doesn’t surprise me most of the interviews, I saw people who had been through these types of things before, it was just a very awkward, strange way of doing it.
Okay, getting them all together. It’s kind of like get them all together in one room, even though it’s virtual, and doing all at once.
I mean, why not?
Why not just send them an email?
Why does it have to be live like that?
And the way he did it, I’ll tell you what the real problem here is the way that he did it, the way he went about doing it. It’s a real problem.
If you’re going to do it that way, you don’t try and show it from the company perspective, which is what he did.
What he did is he went on to explain how the company was being acquired and all this other stuff. And how this is, you know, a net, he said, unfortunate, but you know it’s not that we have to do he did it in a very nonemotional.
I heard someone use the term dispassionate, which I mean, it’s how it should be to an extent. But it’s not the way that you should deliver it, you shouldn’t deliver it on something that’s being recorded.
Something that it is to that many people all at once, if you’re going to then it needs to be choreographed a little better.
You got to think about who your audience is, who are you actually talking to, what are you actually saying to them?
Maybe contemplate, you know, maybe Is there any way we could have done this either earlier, or in a slower progression or something is there any other way to be able to let these people go rather than clean-cut, showing, showing little compassion whatsoever? It that’s, that’s difficult. That’s a difficult play.
In business, you know, if you’re an executive, if you’re a business owner, you understand this concept. And you know that these difficult things have to happen from time to time, but there’s a way to do it. There’s a way not to do it.
What this gentleman did was the way not to do it.
This is why it became this widespread thing, really, because the amount of people that fly all at once, and it was recorded, if it hadn’t been recorded, it would have had a little less staying to the media, except everyone could go and watch him do it over and over again, and mock him for it.
Of course, the news came out today that he’s taking time off, which is pretty easy to do. When you come through, when your company’s been acquired.
You’ve done some of the tough work. I mean, everyone takes time off for the holidays.
So I understand that, of course, they’re going to bring in, you know, the counselors and everything else to help train the management better, which I don’t know how well that’s going to help if you can’t hear yourself, if you can’t see yourself from your employees perspective, you aren’t communicating with them often enough, you do not understand where they’re coming from.
And you don’t know where the world is. If you don’t realize that every little recording every piece of paper, I mean piece of print, I should say that you put out their email, every audio and every video that you put out there.
You have to think what happens if this goes viral?
What happens if this gets put out to public?
What are people going to think?
It’s something we all have to keep in mind, especially when you’re working with a whole lot of virtual staff or you’re you’re working on a widespread and you’re working in situations where things can go up or down rather, rather quickly.
You have to be ready for these type of things and how you’re going to handle it.
You got to put a little more thought into it than this guy has. I feel sorry for him. You know hindsight.
It’s 2021 but yeah, a bit of a PR blunder. But it probably won’t hurt them in the long run. In fact, a lot of most people, when they heard the story, they said, what’s better.com?
Yeah, I’m sure they’ve they pretty much shut down their website from all the people visiting for the first time to better.com Because see what it’s all about.
So it probably won’t hurt them all that much in the long run as far as a company.
As far as this particular CEO, I would try and find something else to be known for if you can be helpful to your career. So that’s all I got for tonight.
Love to hear what do you think about this mass zoom firing?
Is that something that you would go along with?
How would you handle it better?
Leave a comment wherever you’re watching or listening to this. That’s all I got.
You have a good one. Get out there and let the magic happen.