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First of all, thank you so much for sharing your feedback openly. I am always available, as is the rest of the leadership team, to contact directly too with any thoughts and feedback you may have. It is true that we have built a very flexible and caring work environment that enables everyone to prioritize their families, lives, and physical and mental health. It’s one of the many things I’m very proud of in our culture and I am glad you are experiencing that too.
It’s also really great to hear that you feel the people here are some of the nicest you’ve met, which again says a lot about our wonderful culture and also the great work being done in our Talent Acquisition team to bring in amazing people.
I am curious to hear more about your feelings on transparency. You’ve stated in your pros that Labster has a transparent environment, but also said in the cons that leaders (such as myself) claim to be transparent but are not. I’d like to ask you to reflect on what this means for you, and please reach out to me on how we can further improve in this area if you feel comfortable doing so. I understand that when we need to make difficult decisions for the long-term success of the company and mission, especially when they involve reorganizations and redundancies, this can be disheartening and upsetting. It is for me too. However, I want to be clear that we have been incredibly transparent with the reasoning why, and the run-up to the decision in many communications such as our all hands, Q/As and weekly Labster News updates. We articulated the specific market challenges we were facing as so many other companies multiple times and even said we could not rule out redundancies as a result of them and specifically highlighted the main areas multiple teams were working hard on to address these challenges.
There is also a contradiction about hiring. Your post states that we stopped hiring, but then hired again, but never backfilled people who resigned (indicating we were not hiring). The fact is we have not been in a rapid growth stage since last November, and therefore only hired/back-filled necessary critical roles to enable us to transition and adapt to the market changes to ensure the company’s mission and future. In a few cases, we replaced leaders we felt were not the right fit for the company any longer, or not performing to our expectations.
We did not change our strategy last year. As COVID stopped, schools went back to normal faster than anyone had anticipated and thus we had to adjust very quickly to our customers' buying processes.
This year we also did not change our strategy. We have instead been increasing our focus, setting clearer priorities and aligning all OKRs to ensure we are all working closely together and ultimately succeed in realizing the strategy and adapting fast to these market changes. Schools’ buying and decision processes shifted so significantly, which was unexpected by the market and beyond our control - and naturally, we needed to adjust.
I’d like to highlight here, that to support any team member that was impacted by this increased focus, we worked hard to provide every individual with generous severance packages, financial support, healthcare support, individual 1:1 career training, coaching access, and much more. I personally care deeply about any individual impacted, and always strive for us to ensure the best possible future for everyone.
Ultimately I am very sorry that you feel this way about Labster’s future, especially considering all the great things you feel about our culture and environment. I would love to understand more about your thoughts and concrete recommendations and see what further things I and we can do together to improve going forward.
Please do reach out anytime. I hope you know that I both appreciate your feedback deeply and welcome any feedback with open arms, as it’s so critical for us to be able to adapt fast, improve and learn continuously.
