If you're hired, you'll notice almost immediately that transparency is preached heavily. Straight out the gate you feel like you've finally found the tech company you've always wanted because it has heart. The good people at the company truly do have heart and they make the experience wonderful, but then you'll notice Broadly uses that to its advantage to pull the wool over everyone's eyes.
In the 6 months leading up to their 50% reduction in workforce that took place at the end of March 2020, there seemed to be massive changes to the organization on a bi-weekly basis. Each change came with little to no explanation, causing many to worry about the health of Broadly. Occasionally, they would call an all-hands meetings after really big changes but the meetings usually lasted no longer than 5 minutes and consisted of the CEO reading a "heartfelt" speech from her phone. As soon as she was done reading, the meeting would be over. No time for Q&A.
Anyone you talked to, no matter the department, felt a heaviness in the air at the workplace. As the months went on, less information was given, and it felt as if we just had to sit back and watch Broadly dwindle. It wasn't a rare sight to see someone crying in the bathroom or in the stairwell due to lack of clarity or leadership in their role.
And then came the layoffs. All the fears we had about Broadly not truly caring about its employees came into fruition. We had a company wide Zoom meeting where the CEO announced that they would be laying off 50% of the company. She ended the call by saying that all of us would be receiving a zoom link over email as soon as the zoom was over, and that link was the golden ticket to find out if we got to keep our job or not. Well, the links did not come immediately and all at once. They seemed to slowly trickle in, leaving the whole company on slack to anxiously ask each other which link they received.
Overall, I was surprised to see that most of the people who got laid off were Broadly's managers and most tenured people. Some teams were left with only 1 person, and that person was usually the newest and most novice on the team at the time. This tells me that Broadly is seriously struggling financially and that they had to get rid of the people who were getting paid the most. It doesn't really take a rocket scientist to figure that out.
