Urban Company - A spineless org with hypocrite leadership & incompetent middle management
The job market has not been good for the last 12-15 months, but organisations around are offering good severance to their employees and aiding them for their next steps. But UC conducts "performance reviews" twice a year, which is basically a platform for managers to wage a personal vendetta against the "low performers"(read: people who don't suck up to them). And hence, they strategically 'ask people to leave', in return of making sure that terms like 'fired', 'laid off' would not be associated with them. So, people put in their papers, and serve the one month notice without working, and get that salary as their 'severance'.
Leadership team goes on to boast the fact that there hasn't been any layoffs in the company. Well, fair, because one needs to own the fact that they've laid people off, and funnily enough one of the UC values is 'ownership', and managers do OWN the indifference to the sudden absence of a certain team member from meetings.
Apparently, people perform fine till the time these half yearly reviews are conducted, because there isn't any concern about their performances in the regular one-on-ones with the managers, but cometh the review, cometh the concerns with performance. Managers nit pick over employees not responding within 15 minutes to their messages. Also, there isn't a 360° view of performance, so your peers, who work much closer to you don't have a say in your performance.
UC brags a 'meritocratic' culture, and rightly so, where ones merit is their ability to show their work as 10x of what it actually is, appearing to be busy with a completely packed calendar, and always saying yes to whatever manager says, even if it means bending over backwards for them.
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Take a 10-min AI interview to qualify for numerous real jobs auto-matched to your profile 🔑As a result of this, long timers are leaving across all the levels, many are being asked to leave, the overall feeling across teams is one of fear & dismay. The management ensures a "lean & mean" team, achieving all the set targets quarter on quarter, because who needs an encouraging working environment when you can get people to work their asses off by instilling a fear of them being the next person being 'asked to leave due to performance concerns'.
If you're someone who likes to work in a fast paced environment, who likes to be on the edge, and cares about not being fired, rather than focussing on appraisal percentage, you'd be a great fit at UC.
100% true post!
Managers will come together the month before these performance reviews and target employees they want gone, will petty issues like not replied to slack messages, not calling back immediately, being 5 min late to meetings - and quote these as performance issues.
Worse there is no exit interview where an employee can share these concerns - everyone from Founders to HR is involved and they are ok with this culture.
Sad reality of most Indian businesses and managers. They herd you like school teachers and can't seperate work from their life so expect you to do the same
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I hope this gets more traction because I had read something similar on Grapevine itself a few months back but it didn't seem to get a lot of attention unfortunately. Have been hearing similar things about UC and was hoping someone would post about it
Can totally relate to your point @GenuineRuin . I have seen quite important people being laid off in the way you mentioned. And restructuring is a very common occurrence to see nowadays. So many middle and upper management people are moving that it's concerning.
It’s all game. No ethics in Indian based companies
This sucks. Hope u find a better place OP. Such companies really need to be shamed and deter good people from joining them
Tech bros who complain about leadership, I suggest start a business then you will understand the difficulty.
People who complain that leadership hasn't done a good job, is like watching Virat kholi play and discussing which shot he should have played instead. Only the man who stands in the kitchen knows the heat.
I partially agree. While sucking up culture is not good long term, employees need to understand the risk in their roles especially with AI and automations in the mix. No one is really safe, naive to think otherwise.
Almost every company that grows inorganically (Indian b2c startups growing using discounts) will gather poor middle management as even stupid people can sell things on 50% discount and only the stupid stay as they rarely get opportunities outside. All these startups need to understand that they will have to have a different set of people to pull them through these no low funding times.