Grindr has lost about 45% of its staff as it enforces a strict return-to-office policy that was introduced after a majority of employees announced a plan to unionize.
About 80 of the 178 employees at the LGBTQ+ dating app company resigned after the company in August mandated that workers return to work in person two days a week at assigned “hub” offices or be fired, the Communications Workers of America said in a statement Wednesday.
love seeing companies going full mask off now — not even trying to sell the ‘collaborative environment’ bile, it’s purely punitive
That’s a weird way of saying “grindr found a way to lay off half its staff without having to pay severance”
This should honestly be the top comment, most companies appear to be using RTO as a means of doing mass layoffs without the negative PR hit.
RTO itself isn’t negative PR?
Less negative than ‘Grindr lays off half its staff due to economic troubles’
Depends on your audience. Potential employees will hate RTO and fear bad financial news, customers likely won’t care about either, shareholders don’t really care about RTO but will jump ship with bad financial news
Strange that they think this isn’t a negative PR hit, then.
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I don’t think that’s entirely the case though. With layoffs you remove the positions that the company no longer needs, or can’t sustain. With this strategy they’re just randomly losing half the staff. You wouldn’t lay off your chief software architect, or the only guy who knows how your database works, or the account manager who will take all of your vendors with them when they leave. This will cause enormous hardship for the company if the wrong people left.
I suppose they could have done a bunch of mandatory surveys first, asking employees how they felt about a return to the office and carefully monitoring the responses from key personnel, even preemptively mandating documentation or hand-off of responsibilities. That’s incredibly nefarious though if that’s what they did. That might even border on illegal.
You’re taking them at their word that all hands are required back. It is zero effort for them to carve out exceptions for key staff – or literally any group or individual they want to please – while still bleating about ‘come back to the office or be fired’ to the press and everyone else. Corporate heads talking out of both sides of their mouth is the norm, not the exception.
They did that to me. I’m in IT in a ‘critical’ (read - too expensive to rehire for) role for a large company doing forced RTO. I’m the only one on the team in my state, and not near any remaining offices, because they closed my building during COVID. My boss knew I was going to walk if they tried to force me to move, so they carved out an exception for me and I’m still WFH full time while the rest of my team has to go to the office 2 days a week minimum. The whole thing is toxic and destructive to morale. I’m trying to finagle a way to get the severance package because I want out of here before everything finishes circling the drain.
That’s a good point.
Ah the Thanos snap approach to firing.
I can’t agree at all. We do attrition based staff reduction all the time. Years upon years of it. Is it smart and planned? No. Do we survive anyway? Sure.
They’re not losing clients over this so they’ll be fine if they’re less efficient for a while.
Agreed with this, if it’s an attrition play it’s an incredibly incompetent one. I’d argue there’s reason to believe you’d lose the senior employees that you’d want to keep.
If an important position is paid enough, they won’t leave just because of this return to office
Yes, they might. The more important they are, the higher the likelihood that they can get high pay and remote work elsewhere, and have plenty of savings on hand to weather the transition.
On the other hand, they may have a good savings buffer built up.
I’m not sure about anyone who was hired before WFH, but generally, a substantial change to job duties or location is considered constructive dismissal. ie, it’s legally the same as being fired without cause. That might be eligible for severance and definitely for unemployment.
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Serves them right. When your product is completely virtual/ digital, there’s no real reason to be in the office other than “cOLlAboRAtioN”
This was intentional. Tech companies force people back to the office in order to cull employees. IBM is infamous for getting 20+ year employees to quit in order to deny retirement benefits. Grindr is using a time tested method.
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They don’t care. Arrow go up
Yeah, I’ve heard this referred to as The Dead Sea Effect. Seems accurate to me.
That checks out with them using IBM as the example.
IBM also designed the machines and cataloging system used by the Nazis to number Jews in concentration camps. Fun fact As in, like, specifically designed it for the Nazis.
This looks like a fascinating read. I might have to pick this up!
I’m sure they’ll find plenty of top tier new engineers who will take a position at Grindr instead of literally any other job that offers full time WFH support 🙄
Wonder which executive got annoyed that they went into the office, they noticed no one else was suffering in-office with them and this is the outcome.
Hypothetically, if I was called in to an empty office during a pandemic while the top brass worked from the comfort of home, I would absolutely work quietly and diligently from my designated space, and I would absolutely not load up on beans before hand and at every urge of my bowels, wander into those empty corner offices and fumigate every chair, book, keyboard, mousepad and drawer individually and repeatedly.
Wonder which executive got annoyed that they went into the office, they noticed no one else was suffering in-office with them and this is the outcome.
The one that gets the bonus.
They didn’t lose their staff they constructively laid them off. They drastically changed the terms of their employment. Grindr must pay them unemployment benefits.
Even still, that’s nothing, compared to severance or paying their salaries. Especially if they felt they needed to layoff folks anyway.
One company I worked at (in Germany) did a survey asking employees for their preference during the pandemic, 78% wanted a hybrid model with less than half of their time spent in the office, citing many legitimate reasons such as childcare. The management interpretation of this openly reported survey was an “overwhelming desire to return to the pre-pandemic office culture”…in a company full of data scientists, and analysts, it didn’t land so well.
If only they had qualified people to interpret the data…
Return to office is a grift. Tech workers need to unionize.
They were doing so at Grindr. That’s allegedly the catalyst for this happening. The unionize movement has less momentum when you terminate half of your staff.
They needed to many years ago
I wouldn’t resign. Let them fire me and take the severance
I’d imagine you aren’t getting severance for this. Unemployment, maybe, since you could say your employer moved the job location too far away.
Depends on the company. My shitty company is doing forced RTO, in a horrible way, but about the only thing they are doing right is giving standard severance packages for anyone who doesn’t want to comply.
In my country, it is required by law to give any fired employee a fixed amount of monthly salaries, depending on how long the employee was at the company. For example, 3 months if you were 5 years, 6 months if you were 10 years and 1 extra month for every next year after that
You could say the company came to a grinding halt
With gay abandon no less.
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Hey man, only if it’s consensual.
cut payroll without paying unemployment with this simple trick
It wasn’t because of return to work. Workers were attempting to unionize.
They didn’t “lose” their staff— they “discarded” their staff.
Some of this is intentional by design. Shedding head count through willing attrition.
mask off
I see what you did here
Isn’t this like a week old now?
