Many people were surprised by the mass layoffs last week. Those at the company may have been surprised by the way the company let people go.
About 20% of the company's full-time workforce was axed last week, according to half a dozen current and former workers. A lot of people had short meetings with their managers on Wednesday. During the meetings managers read a script about what was going to happen next and where people could find out more about their benefits.
Those who were still able to log in to their work tools experienced that. Many people who were laid off were locked out of company tools before they were told they were being let go.
A worker affected by the layoffs said it was messy.
The person said that teams were kicked off the calls before they were told what was happening. Some people couldn't even login to get laid off because the internal tech team revoked all corporate authorizations.
Some former employees said last week that they were left with limited information and no response from the HR department when they tried to contact them.
"We had to constantly reach out via text to colleagues who were not laid off and ask them to put messages in Slack about how we were supposed to access stuff to know more details," one former worker said.
The spokeswoman for the company said that the CEO apologized for the IT issues that resulted in the layoffs. The laid off employees were not present at the meeting. As Insider previously reported, during the meeting, Spiegel urged workers who kept their jobs to prove the doubters wrong.
A post-mortem is being conducted and we are following up with any team members who may have been affected.
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