CEO sacks 900 employees via Zoom call right before holiday season

Imagine this — it’s almost Christmas, you’re working from home and you’re invited to a Zoom call from your boss with your colleagues. Instead of an early holiday greeting, though, you get the boot.

900 employees faced this scenario when digital mortgage company Better.com’s chief executive announced the sack in a three-minute call which has now gone viral.

“I do not want to do this, the last time I did this, I cried,” founder and CEO Vishal Garg, 43, said during the call.

“If you are on this call, you are part of the unlucky group that is being laid off. Your employment is terminated, effective immediately,” he said.

Some of the reasons he cited for laying off, just a few weeks before Christmas, include market efficiency, productivity and performance.

According to media reports, the company clarified that they are laying off 9 per cent of the company — employees in the US and India — instead of 15 per cent he said during the call.

The company was founded in 2016 and had received US$750 million (S$1025.2 million) in investments and is going public soon according to CNN.

This is not the first time Garg has made the news. In a 2020 Forbes report, he once sent an email to employees which said: “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.”

In 2020, experts said companies have been conducting retrenchment exercises online due to work from home arrangements, meanwhile, employment lawyers got more requests about retrenchment packages.