Ryan Breslow, the boss of fintech company Bolt, sacked his entire HR team for “creating problems that did not exist” and says that issues “disappeared” after the sweeping layoffs. The Sun has the story.
Bolt, a company that expedites online checkouts, laid off around 30% of its workforce in April in its fourth round of job cuts in as many years.
Ryan Breslow, the co-founder and CEO of Bolt, defended the decision, saying it was aimed at helping the struggling business return to a start-up culture.
Speaking at an event hosted by Fortune, he said: “We had an HR team, and that HR team was creating problems that didn’t exist.
“Those problems disappeared when I let them go.
“We’re back in start-up mode again, and those HR professionals have really important insights when you’re in a peacetime and when you’re at a larger company.“
The department has since been replaced with a smaller “people operation team” that trains and supports employees.
Breslow added: “We need a group of people who are very oriented around getting things done, and there is just a culture of not getting things done and complaining a lot.”
Worth reading in full.
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HR are so full of themselves that they have their own international day. Mostly still crap though.
“…and those HR professionals have really important insights when you’re in a peacetime and when you’re at a larger company.“
Which are?
Can someone tell me what’s wrong with Personnel? HR always sounds robotic and uncaring, which I suppose does rather sum things up nowadays.
Even Fritz Sauckel, that great deployer if human resources, would have declined the services of many of those to be found in ‘HR’. One would expect more humanity from a personnel clerk at Treblinka than from the usual collection of ambulant personality disorders.
Let’s start with the UK civil service. Pure obstructionists.
Indeed. Their job should be as “facilitators” of government policy, to use a modern phrase.
Women run HR. Women are unknowing destroyers of civilisation when they are allowed to get their hands on power.
Destroy HR and go back to Personnel Departments whose job it is to manage only the administration around hiring, firing and people administration issues only.
An industry has been created that fits with female obsessions with how people feel, and being nice to people always, in spite of how crap they may be at their job. And now the obsession with periods and menopause and women’s issues. All gets in the way of organisational performance.
Get Women out of men’s way.
My experience of HR, admittedly limited, is that it tries to follow the legislation. Opinions may vary on how good an idea this is, but it seems like employment law is heavily weighted in favour of employees.
What I’ve always found entertaining on this site, and why it is nothing more than an echo chamber which functions very much like an exclusive club, is the rank hypocrisy that’s regularly on display.
Isn’t it interesting how misogynists lose their tiny collective minds when called out on their blatant misogyny in much the same way as the racists do ( a lot of overlap there, as it seems rare on here to harbour just the one prejudice ) when their evident racism is highlighted?
These people feel they can chat shit and generally disparage entire groups of people with impunity, but woe betide any woman who’s even remotely critical of them or who offers a counter argument.
It’s that good ole “free speech for me but not for thee” again, which is so prevalent on here, much like the inevitable campaign of gaslighting:
“Misogyny/racism? What misogyny/racism?”🙄
The best PM I’ve experienced in my lifetime was Margaret Thatcher. You couldn’t describe her as worrying how people felt or being nice to people always. She hauled this country out of the doldrums of the 70s, but successive male PMs have contrived steadily to undo it all.
Perhaps, but she also led the charge in de-industrialisation and pushing the UK into a service industry. Her attack on the command economy that we had become was needed but the privatisation idea that followed was nothing like the private enterprise that drove the Industrial Revolution. In this new privatisation the engineers became nothing more than staff and with asset stripping burning through many a good company. We threw away skills that would have earned us revenue on the basis many were old fashioned. This betrays her poor understanding of what true engineering and scientific skills are, which are highly adaptive to just about anything. She refused to fund shipyards on the basis that industry was old fashioned, even though two thirds of the World’s surface is ocean. All the technological and scientific advancements of the 1800s were created by engineers and scientists with little experience in those advancments. How can you be experienced and trained in something that doesn’t exist until you create it. One particular example of her not understanding how engineering works was her handling and eventual cancellation of the Advanced Passenger Train. Like many engineering projects since 1945 this particualar one had government interferance which would… Read more »
And there it is, with 100% predictability. The spokesman for the DS Misogynist Society, who represents all the other women-haters that lurk and take refuge on this site.
We know you hate us and never do anything other than denigrate and scapegoat us when the opportunity arises. Perhaps consider getting it printed on a T-shirt for broader appeal.🤷♀️
It’s men like you who alienate women from Right-wing politics and why I’d rather lobotomize myself with a rusty knitting needle than be associated with the Right if this is what you lot represent.
Seek help. Your issues with the female sex have reached pathological proportions.
Perhaps it began with Mysandry? Where I work we were subject to a compusary survey supplied by a women’s college investigating sexism, or something similar. Below is just one example of the loaded type of questions that are devisive. As it happens I interupt other people a lot, men and women, and I learned this from my Scots Irish mother. If you didn’t interupt you didn’t talk.
As a consequence of this survey Unconscioues Bias training was added to our annual compulsory trainingv regime. I have still not completed this dreadful ‘struggle session’ and credit to my company that have said nothing.
Your screenshot doesn’t demonstrate misandry because it also provides the same question about being interrupted by a woman, therefore it’s balanced.
Meanwhile, with regards to this site, let’s check on the dictionary definitions so we know we’re all on the same page;
”Misandry: feelings of hating men.” ( Cambridge.org )
I have never once seen any posts by women on here which would meet the definition of misandry. In comparison;
”Misogyny: feelings of hating women, or the belief that men are much better than women.” ( Cambridge.org )
I have read countless comments posted by men over the years on here which irrefutably meet the definition of misogyny.
Discuss.
Good man, I recommend more companies follow his lead
Please extend this worldwide, you’ll be doing everyone a massive favour.
“creating problems that did not exist”
To paraphrase Mandy Rice-Davies, they would, wouldn’t they? In other news, the mafia warn your business might burn down if you don’t pay them money.
Personnel – making sure the company has enough people in the right place at the right time. That’s it.
My first job was at a large FTSE 250. It had 800 employees and it was all managed very well by two very practical and sensible ladies in Personnel.
Then the whole thing became Human Resources and got invaded by some pretty nasty types.
It’s a similar story with Health and Safety – once an add-on task to someone’s day job. Then it became a profession, and of course no H&S professional is going to say “just use your common sense” to any potential problem, even if the chances of that problem actually arising are infinitesimally small.
Yes, when and why did just about every organisation transmute Personnel into HR?
Mid-late nineties that change happened…
The once payroll and hiring/firing clerks crawled their way up to the Board driving the diversity and inclusion (DEI) “culture”. Instead of working for the welfare of the enterprise (big or small) they prioritised “employee well-being, and workplace engagement” with a “I want to be a partner” ambition, ending with biting the hand that feeds them.
As soon as the name changed from personnel to Human Resources it started to go to s**t in my experience… getting involved in things it didn’t need to…
You could extrapolate the lesson and do the same with the state bureaucracy as a whole.
Everything would instantly be better, because much of what they do is simply think of new and completely unnecessary ways to control us further and extract more time and money from us.
The product of bureaucracy is bureaucracy – it is a self-licking ice-cream cone.