Kit Roberts
A CEO has responded to a 'painful' video in which a woman documented the call where she was laid off from her job.
The video posted to TikTok shows employee Brittany Pietsch on a video call with two colleagues.
Pietsch said she expected the meeting was coming, as a number of colleagues had been laid off on the same day, but what she didn't know was that her manager was not going to be present.
Instead the meeting was with a director and someone from HR, neither of whom she had met before.
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She repeatedly asked the two people why she was being fired, citing her own performance over the three and a half month period she had worked for the company.
She argued that her performance had still been good and she had been working very hard.
And despite her asking repeatedly, it was not made clear on that call why she was being let go.
In the video, she told them: "It must be very easy for you to have these little 10, 15 minute meetings, tell someone that they're fired, completely wreck their whole life, and then that's it with no explanation - that's extremely traumatizing for people if you can imagine that.”
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The HR representative that she was speaking to replied: “I don't think there's anything we can say at this moment or today, Brittany, that's going to change the way that you feel. Again, it's understandable, I'm taking notes and feedback. We'll circle back."
The company is called Cloudfare, and provides 'security and performance for millions of Internet properties'.
After the video went viral, the company's CEO, Matthew Prince, has responded to the backlash after the video was published online.
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He wrote: “We fired ~40 sales people out of over 1,500 in our go-to market org. That's a normal quarter.
"When we're doing performance management right, we can often tell within 3 months or less of a sales hire, even during the holidays, whether they're going to be successful or not. Sadly, we don't hire perfectly. We try to fire perfectly."
He continued: “The video is painful for me to watch. Managers should always be involved. HR should be involved, but it shouldn't be outsourced to them, no employee should ever actually be surprised they weren't performing. We don't always get it right.”
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The CEO also committed to handling such situations better in the future.
He said: “Any healthy org needs to get the people who aren't performing off. That wasn't the mistake here.
"The mistake was not being as kind and humane as we were. And that's something @zatlyn [Michelle Zatlyn - COO of Cloudflare] and I am focused on improving going forward.”