Giving Twitter staff just 48 hours to decide whether or not to accept an offer of severance contained in an email from the company’s then new owner Elon Musk without knowing what the final terms would be was “not ideal”, a senior HR executive with the company conceded.
Lauren Wegman, senior director of people experience at what is now called X, told the Labour Court the company was “three to four months” away from becoming insolvent and had to move quickly.
In the November 2022 Fork In the Road email, Mr Musk said staff needed to tick a box in order to sign up to a new “hardcore” work culture at the firm or they would be deemed to have resigned their positions with the company and receive three month’s pay as severance.
The company is appealing awards totalling €550,131 by the Workplace Relations Commission to a former senior manager at its Dublin office, Gary Rooney, who did not tick the box and was subsequently held by Twitter to have resigned.
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On Wednesday, the Labour Court heard Mr Rooney, whose severance package under the terms of the “offer” was a little more than €20,000, had received gross pay, including share bonuses related to the company share price, of €334,114,84 during 2022.
The WRC held that the time frame set out in the Musk email involved could not be considered “reasonable notice” to allow an employee to make an informed decision on the email’s contents.
During Wednesday’s proceedings, Ms Wegman acknowledged in response to questioning by Padraic Lyons for Mr Rooney that the lack of detail relating to severance package was “not ideal” but that providing more comprehensive information at the time “was not possible”.
This, she said, was because the company “three to four months” away from becoming insolvent and had to move quickly.
Mr Lyons contested this, saying official company’s messaging for the first two quarters of 2022 had suggested it was profitable. Ms Wegman said a variety of factors contributed to a declining financial position.
When it was put to her that the time frame and options presented to employees in Mr Musk’s email, including that inaction was taken to be decision to resign, had been “arbitrary and irrational”, Ms Wegman said “it would have been nice to have a ‘no’ box but that wasn’t part of the design”.
Despite that, she said, a majority of employees had clicked the box indicating they wished to continue to working with the company ahead of the deadline and she believed the choice set out had been both reasonable and clear.
While some of the way things had been done had not been “ideal”, she said, there was “a lot of context” and it had been “a very extraordinary time”.
The process had not been “very easy”, she said, for the employer which was left with many “gaps in terms of critical skills” and had been challenging for a HR department that had lost roughly half of its staff in the preceding weeks during which an initial round of cost cutting was implemented by the new owner.
She rejected the suggestion the email represented an ultimatum to the company’s roughly 4,000 remaining employees but Mr Lyons said it was “the very definition of an ultimatum”.
He put it to her it was completely unreasonable that Mr Rooney had been given 46 hours, less the time he was asleep “to deal with this bombshell”. She said she had responded within that time frame.
Responding to the suggestion Mr Rooney did not know what he might be signing up to in terms of increased workload, expectation or hours, she said his company record suggested he was a high performer. She considered herself a high performer too, she said, and had not, as a consequence, believed she had anything to fear.
