- Between the well-publicized issues with its company culture and its equally publicized layoffs, some WeWork employees are worried for their careers.
- Some say that new job offers aren’t hard to come by, but feel they are being offered substandard wages.
- Others fear the association with WeWork’s culture will impact their future job prospects.
- A survey of WeWork employees on anonymous chat app Blind found that about 30% of those who took the poll have these concerns.
- While that indicates most employees feel that their time at WeWork is a net positive for their careers, the concern is broad enough that at least one manager addressed it head-on in a post on LinkedIn.
- Read more WeWork news here.
As WeWork commences its layoffs this week, some WeWork employees are concerned that their time with the company has hurt their careers.
Some are worried about the impact of their association with WeWork, employees tell Business Insider. This after the company’s IPO ambitions imploded under a barrage of headlines about the hard-partying, tequila-drinking culture created by founder and ousted CEO Adam Neumann — along with questions over its corporate governance, its business model, and self-dealing in the executive suite.
But, as Business Insider previously reported, while Neumann was living large, employees under him were working long, hard hours.
One current WeWork manager, who just celebrated his four-year-anniversary at the company, addressed this concern head-on when he offered to help those who were cut in the layoffs.
“Don’t think for a second that the tumultuous headlines you’ve seen translate beyond the c-suite. There are a ton of driven, creative, entrepreneurial, resilient friends hitting the job market,” wrote Jesse Ganes director architecture, product development and management on a LinkedIn post on Thursday. Ganes declined further comment.
Many WeWork employees have been looking for new jobs for months, ever since the company started warning them that big layoffs were coming. Those layoffs began in earnest this week, with the company saying that it currently has plans to cut 2,400 people. WeWork is also transferring about 1,000 janitorial and facilities management staff off its payroll to roles with a contractor.
One person who worked for WeWork in New York on special programs told Business Insider that getting a new job offer wasn’t hard, but that the offers were for reduced salaries than the WeWork job.
“Everyone knows where we are so the lowball offers are coming strong. It’s like a drip campaign, everyone knows that everyone applying who works at WeWork can be lowballed,” this person said.
A Blind survey
A survey of WeWork employees on Blind conducted for Business Insider found that others share these sentiments. Blind is the anonymous chat app for employees that validates work email addresses but does not reveal the person behind the username.
In a survey of 230 respondents, 38% said they worried that negative perception toward the company would hurt their career. This also means that 62% were not concerned. About half the people who responded said they feared that layoffs would impact them.
Likewise, 132 people responded to a poll asking them if working at WeWork would negatively impact their compensation from their next employer. 68% of respondents were actively looking for a new job, and 30% said they were, in fact, worried about lowball offers.
Interestingly, that worry was more intense for folks with non-tech job roles, 34%, versus the 26% for who had tech roles. Demand remains high for skilled programmers and IT professionals. Equally interestingly, 81% of the people with tech roles said they were actively seeking a new job.
WeWork did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Are you an insider with insight to share? Contact Julie Bort on encrypted chat app Signal at (970) 430-6112 using a non-work phone (no PR inquiries, please), or email at jbort@businessinsider.com. Open DMs on Twitter @Julie188.
- Now read:
- Sex, tequila, and a tiger: Employees inside Adam Neumann’s WeWork talk about the nonstop party to attain a $100 billion dream and the messy reality that tanked it
- People have noticed WeWork’s ‘sad’ empty booth at a big software developer conference
- WeWork layoffs began on Monday, sources say, with one person calling it a ‘small mercy’
- WeWork’s toxic phone booths were created in-house by its Powered by We business
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