Awful handling of layoff - Talent Acquisition FreshBooks Employee Review

2.0
30 Nov 2022
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

The people are incredibly kind and smart; mostly easy to work with A culture of acceptance, authenticity, and innovation. Very flexible

Cons

Very ambiguous - don't expect a lot of guidance or process and procedure. Might be a great opportunity, but at times very frustrating Leadership has zero foresight: - We were still hiring recruiters 2 months before a sudden hiring freeze, which means they couldn't even forecast their budget and revenue 2 months in advance. - Roles are being created very thoughtlessly, which led to over-hiring. Horrible handling of layoff: - CHRO (Renee Pianka) announced that the TA was going to be targeted for layoff in front of the whole HR team with no follow-up for questions and discussions. Talk about emotional security! - CHRO candidly talked about upcoming Christmas celebration in the same conversation knowing full well some of us wouldn't even be there for it. Talk about empathy! - CHRO called an all-hr team meeting to announce layoffs had been complete and AGAIN talked about a potential offsite. Talk about being tone deaf! - Leadership poached 3 people who got affected by the Shopify layoff, and then guess what, laid off those people again within the span of a few months. - CEO (Don Epperson) sent an email to the whole company to announce the layoffs after the fact and said 'thanks' to those affected, who obviously didn't receive that email since they had lost email access. He sure didn't give them any appreciation of their effort while they were still there.

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FreshBooks Response
2y
We appreciate you being open and sharing your experience with us. We truly value feedback from our current and past employees as it helps us continually improve our company culture. Firstly, thank you for your positive remarks about our team members and the culture of acceptance, authenticity, and innovation. We pride ourselves on fostering an environment that values these qualities, and we are pleased to hear that you enjoy this aspect of FreshBooks. We agree that our amazing people are our biggest asset and strength. We are sorry to hear about your experiences related to leadership, and feeling as though decisions were ambiguous and lacked foresight. We strive to provide clear guidelines when navigating through challenging situations, and we’ll take feedback like yours into consideration as we continue to evaluate our processes and work to improve. Regarding your comments about the handling of layoffs, we are sorry to hear you felt additional distress during an already difficult time. We want to clarify that we do strive to handle such matters with the utmost sensitivity and empathy. We understand the gravity of layoffs and the impact they have on the lives of those affected, as well as those of remaining employees. We assure you that reductions are a decision we never take lightly and we’re sorry if we fell short of your expectations during this process. We take all of your comments seriously and will continue working to ensure that our actions align with our values moving forward. We are committed to learning from this and making necessary improvements. Thank you again for sharing your feedback, and we wish you all the best in your future endeavors.

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