This CEO did the right thing in firing his entire HR team, even if he still harbors misplaced confidence in the utility of Human Relations for the corpocracy:
Bolt’s CEO has defended his decision to fire the company’s entire HR team, claiming they had been ‘creating problems that didn’t exist’. Ryan Breslow, the co-founder and chief executive of US fintech firm Bolt, said the department was scrapped as part of sweeping layoffs aimed at returning the struggling business to ‘start-up mode’.
The company, which develops software designed to speed up online checkouts, cut around 30 per cent of its workforce in April in its fourth round of layoffs in as many years. Speaking at a Fortune event, Breslow 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.’ The 32-year-old added that HR professionals were more suited to ‘peacetime’ conditions at larger companies rather than a start-up environment focused on rapid growth and efficiency.
Bolt has since replaced the department with a smaller ‘people operations team’ responsible for employee training and support. ‘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,’ Breslow said.
Eliminating the HR department in its entirety was one of my top recommendations in Corporate Cancer. Like the legal department, it is entirely unproductive. But unlike the legal department, it is unnecessary, it does not mitigate risk, and it is actively counterproductive. The average company would see better results from paying their HR employees to stay home full-time without having any contact with anyone in the organization for any reason.