How good are you at walking on eggshells? - Anonymous employee Huddol Employee Review

This is very sad to read. No CEO likes to see such a high degree of disappointment in an employee's experience. We work very hard to make our team feel welcome and included while being very sensitive to their work/life balance. We check in and do our very best to make sure that everyone is heard, included, and feels welcome to be a part of the process and solution. We're also extremely transparent when we can't include every POV on every move or strategy or when we simply need to move a time sensitive matter forward. Reviews are a good kind of tough love and we appreciate the input. Anonymity is important as well, but problematic when people misrepresent themselves. We would never malign anyone because it's not how we work, or consistent with the human centered values we uphold. But important for readers to know the plain facts. The employee in question worked with us for 1 day - we know this because we haven't let anyone else go in the recent past and the review was published 1 day after they were let go. We're also a very small team. Hard to mistake this for anyone else. Context matters for reviews; in this case, 1 day is the context. That's 1 day worth of work and 1 day worth of review and 1 day worth of perspective. Never have we had anyone work for us for 1 day, and never have we felt so strongly about a non-fit to have to let someone go after 1 day. They are right though. The office can be on the noisy side- we work in an old factory building and the insulation is bad. The building is a hub for start ups and despite our best efforts we could not reach a resolution on the noise issue. We're moving after only one year because we want our team to be happy. No benefits...that's true as well. We're a very small company with modest means. We try to make up for it in so many other ways, like flexible hours and flexible working location and through a lot of caring and support. No amount of care or support could have created proper alignment in this situation. It is also true that we are also gloriously busy; busy trying to make the world a better place – unfortunately we sometimes let some people down in that process. We don’t feel good that we disappointed this person, but do feel good that it was the best decision for both parties. I also so agree that we are sweet people, everyone, perhaps in this case except for me. I will fall on the sword because I hired the person in question and then embarrassingly let that same person go 8 hours later. Doesn't make that person bad or our company bad, just means that some pegs and some holes sometimes don't align, and sometimes, and hopefully only one time, you know that you’ve made a wrong turn after 8 hours of travelling down a bumpy road. Mark Stolow, CEO, Huddol