CEO tells employees to leave if they want to work from home and they did just that

A CEO's attempt to show their staff who was boss backfired when staff resigned after being told to leave if they wanted to work from home.

Posting on Reddit, an employee at an unnamed food delivery app explained that staff didn't feel comfortable returning to the office amid the continued coronavirus pandemic, but when they raised it with senior staff their concerns were not exactly addressed.

They wrote:

"For a short while last year, I worked as a team lead for one of the app development teams for one of the food delivery apps. The entire team had been working from home since the start of the pandemic and had had a bunch of remote-only people join, so they were spread across several time zones, but we made it work because we thought this was how things were going to be going forward.

But the senior team then decided "we would all be heading back to the office part time, gradually increasing to full time.

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"We had been told when we were hired that any return to work policy would be super flexible and it turned out it really wasn't," he wrote.

So, the team took matters into their own hands, after a Q&A with the CEO about whether the company would consider allowing flexible work didn't go too well.

The CEO apparently said: "Look. This is what we're doing and what we think is best for the company. If you want to work from home, my suggestion is to go work somewhere else".

This didn't go down well. The employee continued: "What happened next was the digital equivalent of the air being let out of a balloon. The company Slack channel conversations ground to a halt and became virtual ghost towns, going from spirited conversations to the bare minimum of functional courtesies. The attendance at company-wide meetings fell by half and within a month, there was a veritable flurry of resignations, including mine.

"By the time I left, the team that started at 8 people was down to just 2 deciding to stay. And six months later, word is they are still trying to find people.

"As for me - I got a 50 per cent pay bump for less responsibilities and work just a few hours a day instead of tons of unpaid overtime trying to put out fires at that old s**tshow."

Reacting to the story, people thought the employees were in the right.

One said: “If you won’t let your employees work from home, someone else will.”

Another commented: "I don't understand why corporations won't jump on the fact that they wouldn't have to rent offices anymore. That's a lot of extra cash for their yachts."

And a third said: "The WFH Pandora's box has been opened and there is no closing it. Companies that want to attract the best talent will at least have to offer hybrid working."

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