A CEO admitted his company’s mistake of lacking humanity when they fired a woman who had gone viral for posting the moment she was laid off on social media.
The video in question saw former employee Brittany Pietsch filming herself while on a video call with two admins.
The clip was uploaded by a second party on the alexyardigans TikTok account, which posts a variety of different videos, and amassed 3.4 million views since it was posted on Friday (January 12).
In the video, the title reads: “Brittany Pietsch, an account executive at Cloudflare, records her layoff experience,” accompanied by a subhead just under it that reads: “POV (point of view): you’re about to get laid off.”
Brittany Pietsch filmed herself getting fired while on a video call, sparking a response from the company’s CEO
Brittany seemingly expected the meeting was coming, as she explained in the clip that a number of her colleagues had been “getting random 15-minute call invites all day,” likely getting fired.
As Brittany opened her video call, another subtext explained that her best friend at work had gotten a call to get sacked just 30 minutes before her own virtual meeting.
In the clip, Brittany is subsequently shown speaking to two different voices belonging to people she alleges she didn’t know: “a woman from HR (human resources) and a director man I’ve never heard of.”
As the director could be heard starting his statement and blaming her performance, Brittany cut him off and boldly exclaimed: “Yes, I’m gonna stop you right there,” which she followed in the clip with a text that read: “I wanted to stand up for myself, because what did I have to lose?”
“It must be very easy for you to have these little 10, 15 minute meetings, tell someone that they’re fired, and then that’s it with no explanation,” she told the IT company
The discouraged worker went off to explain that she has had the “highest activity on her team” and “done a really great job managing her deals.”
In the video, Brittany asked why she was faced with two strangers rather than her manager, whom she said had given her nothing but positive feedback.
Throughout the call, the now ex-Cloudflare employee was seen trying to understand why she was being laid off without receiving any concrete answers.
In the video, she told them: “It must be very easy for you to have these little 10, 15 minute meetings, tell someone that they’re fired, completely wreck their whole life, and then that’s it with no explanation – that’s extremely traumatizing for people if you can imagine that.”
Brittany expected the meeting was coming, as she explained in the clip that a number of her colleagues had been “getting random 15-minute call invites all day”
Watch Brittany “stand up for herself” while getting fired from Cloudflare below
@brittanypeachhh Original creator reposting: brittany peach cloudflare layoff. When you know you’re about to get laid off so you film it :) this was traumatizing honestly lmao #cloudflare #techlayoffs #tech #layoff ♬ original sound – Brittany Pietsch
The representatives, who we later learned from the clip were called Dom and Rosie, replied: “I don’t think there’s anything we can say at this moment or today, Brittany, that’s going to change the way that you feel. Again, it’s understandable, I’m taking notes and feedback. We’ll circle back.”
Cloudflare is an American company that provides content delivery network services, cloud cybersecurity, and other IT services.
Taking to her LinkedIn page, Brittany revealed that her manager had no idea this was happening. She wrote: “My manager was just as blindsided as I was. On the call, you can hear the HR rep admit that they could not attest to what my manager has said about my performance.”
She further stated: “On the call, I was not attempting to save my job, but only trying to understand exactly why I was being let go in the way that I was. I felt like I was in the twilight zone.”
The disappointed account executive questioned: “We as employees are expected to give 2 weeks’ notice and yet we don’t deserve even a sliver of respect when the roles are reversed?”
Upon viewing the now-viral video, the company’s CEO, Matthew Prince, responded to the backlash.
“The mistake was not being as kind and humane as we were,” the company’s CEO, Matthew Prince, said in response to the backlash
Image credits: eastdakota
He also admitted that he found the viral video “painful” to watch
We fired ~40 sales people out of over 1,500 in our go to market org. That’s a normal quarter. When we’re doing performance management right, we can often tell within 3 months or less of a sales hire, even during the holidays, whether they’re going to be successful or not. Sadly,…
— Matthew Prince 🌥 (@eastdakota) January 12, 2024
Taking to his X account (formerly known as Twitter), he wrote: “We fired ~40 sales people out of over 1,500 in our go-to-market org. That’s a normal quarter.
“When we’re doing performance management right, we can often tell within 3 months or less of a sales hire, even during the holidays, whether they’re going to be successful or not. Sadly, we don’t hire perfectly. We try to fire perfectly.”
He continued: “The video is painful for me to watch. Managers should always be involved. HR should be involved, but it shouldn’t be outsourced to them, no employee should ever actually be surprised they weren’t performing. We don’t always get it right.”
The CEO also committed to handling such situations better in the future. Matthew said: “Any healthy org needs to get the people who aren’t performing off. That wasn’t the mistake here.
“The mistake was not being as kind and humane as we were. And that’s something @zatlyn [Michelle Zatlyn – COO of Cloudflare] and I am focused on improving going forward.”
Many readers blamed HR for the poor delivery
Valerie Vadala, an experienced global talent acquisition leader told Forbes: “There were a few missteps here. I think the biggest is that her manager was not present.”
After seeing Brittany’s TikTok, Valerie explained to the publication: “It’s a sign of leadership to be present and to let the employee know that the company realizes it is personal.
“It’s incredibly painful to be laid off. To make it something cold and transactional is denying the reality that you have just gut-punched a person’s career trajectory.”
The HR executive further said that Brittany’s firing was “incredibly egregious” by making it performance-based. “If you are doing a companywide layoff, which this clearly was, don’t make it about performance,” she added.
Some readers thought the incident was the product of “feral capitalism at work”
