Virta seems amazing, and in some aspects, it is, but the values come off as disingenuous and fraudulent because leadership doesn’t believe in them. It’s 100% understandable that you aren’t always going to align with or live out your organization’s values, but Virta really hammers them home multiple times a day on multiple lines of communication, so you expect HR to invest in hiring leadership who is true to their values. Virta recently laid off ~25% of its workforce at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. While they did offer severance and payout for health insurance, each teammate was immediately locked out of their computer after a short Zoom call with other teammates and HR telling them they were laid off. Each individual with questions had to seek out a meeting with HR and a manager to get more information about why they were laid off rather than a meeting being offered, which I think is incredibly inappropriate (and HR decided to just never show up to mine with no explanation). Employees sign a contract that they are at will; business is business, and Virta or any organization doesn’t owe any sort of explanation for why layoffs happen. It just seems fraudulent for Virta to pride itself on its values when they don’t live up to them when it really matters most. Virta encouraged employees who weren't laid off to not reach out to those who were, which is bizarre. Certain managers were amazing, and others were quite condescending, and pushed hard that they were so about the mission and being "people first" but their attitude, body language, and remarks didn't align with what they were trying to present themselves as. I get it that you don't have to be a perfect representation of the values of your organization, but certain acts of kindness or comments that were intended to be positive came off as disingenuous from certain managers, which left such a bad taste. Virta has had sexual misconduct allegations and multiple layoffs, historically all of which have been managed poorly. Managers would show up late to meetings consistently, were spread way too thin managing large teams, and weren’t able to discuss opportunities for improvement with their subordinates because they were expected to manage incredibly large teams and develop/implement systems for the business to run. A lot of the internal systems and processes are archaic, disorganized, and lacks division of responsibility. Pay is also lower than market. The outside looking in seems great, and the flexibility of the position (if you’re not a health coach) is great, but when you get into the thick of things, Virta leaves much to be desired.
