In response to criticism, CEO talks about 'doing performance management right' and says managers should always be involved in dismissals
A worker recently fired by two human resources personnel over Zoom recorded and posted the incident online – causing discomfort to many viewers, including the company’s CEO.
In a TikTok video posted on Jan. 11, Brittany Pietsch is shown being fired from her marketing position at Cloudflare by two HR personnel over a video call.
“I got let go by two people I don't know: a woman from HR and a director man I’ve never heard of,” Pietsch wrote in the video.
In the video, the man was heard telling Pietsch that she was being let go because she was not meeting Cloudflare’s expectations based on 2023 performance evaluations.
Pietsch told them she had “the highest activity amongst her team” and did a great job “managing her deals”.
To this, the woman replied: “I don't think there's anything we can say in this moment or today Brittany that's going to change the way that you feel.”
'It's not going to change the outcome of this situation,' she added.
Previously, a worker fired for “unsatisfactory performance” argued that he did not underperform.
In the video, Pietsch writes that she had an idea of what was to come because a friend of hers went through the same thing just minutes before she did.
“I wanted to stand up for myself [because] what did I have to lose?”
CEO addresses performance management
Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince was one of the millions who saw Pietsch’s video, and said that it was “painful to watch”.
“We fired ~40 sales people out of over 1,500 in our go to market [organization]. That’s a normal quarter. When we’re doing performance management right, we can often tell within [three] 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. In this case, clearly we were far from perfect,” Prince said via social media platform X.
He also admitted that the way they fired Pietsch was wrong.
“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,” he 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 more kind and humane as we did. And that’s something [Cloudflare COO Michelle Zatlyn] and I are focused on improving going forward.”
Prince also noted that just because they let go someone does not mean that that individual cannot succeed elsewhere.
“We don’t always get it right. And sometimes under performing employees don’t actually listen to the feedback they’ve gotten before we let them go. Importantly, just because we fire someone doesn’t mean they’re a bad employee. It doesn’t mean [they] won’t be really, really great somewhere else.”
Previously, Better.com’s CEO apologized for firing 900 employees on Zoom call.
Employment law considerations
Meanwhile, Austen Allred, co-founder and CEO of Bloomtech, raised some key points about the firing of Pietsch, via X.
For one, it looks like the company “was nuking most of the sales org,” he said.
“If they’re keeping <25% of an org the calculus isn’t ‘Are they doing a good job and have we given them a fair shake?’ It’s more ‘Who are the top performers we need to keep? We have to get rid of everyone else’. Totally unfair to her. It may have been nigh impossible to reach the performance bar required to stay. But hard to say with no info.”
Allred also said the fact that it’s two HR people who don’t know Pietsch firing her is either “a big misstep or it implies her manager (and possibly her manager’s manager etc.) are gone too.”
He also said that the “HR team was probably given a big list of names they needed to tell, and probably had no clue as to why the decision making led to some staying and some going.”
Lastly, Allred said that Cloudflare may be trying to evade the law with the incident.
“It’s interesting that they’re so clear it’s performance-based and not a layoff. That’s not an accident. Could be to avoid regulations around the WARN act, or as justification to give zero severance. Usually in this call they go over the high level of that stuff, but this one took a turn.”
Months after Vishal Garg fired 900 people via Zoom, he was reinstalled as Better.com's CEO.
