Sounds like a healthy corporate environment run by professionals. /s
A company choosing not to submit to popular politics shouldn't immediately prompt doubt of organizational health or professionalism.
They've clearly articulated their actual core values, and are offering very generous severance to employees who disagree. This is a sign of vibrant health if I've ever seen one.
> In 2019, former Kraken employees posted scathing comments about the company on Glassdoor, a website where workers write anonymous reviews of their employers. [...] In response, Kraken’s parent company sued the anonymous reviewers and tried to force Glassdoor to reveal their identities. A court ordered Glassdoor to turn over some names. On Glassdoor, Mr. Powell has a 96 percent approval rating. The site adds, “This employer has taken legal action against reviewers.”
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> That same day, he invited employees to join him in a Slack channel called “debate-pronouns” where he suggested that people use pronouns based not on their gender identity but their sex at birth, according to conversations seen by The Times. He shut down replies to the thread after it became contentious. Mr. Powell reopened discussion on Slack the next day to ask why people couldn’t choose their race or ethnicity. He later said the conversation was about who could use the N-word, which he noted wasn’t a slur when used affectionately.
It is absolutely childish, unprofessional behavior for a CEO to derail a whole company by creating Slack channels for sophomoric 'debates' about questions such as 'is it actually rude and shitty for white people to use racial slurs' and then just shut them down when the conversation doesn't sufficiently favor his view for his liking.
The BI piece is a bit less explicit about the CEO's ridiculous behavior.
[0] Archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20220615180655/http://www.nytime...
It's also very good evidence for a Title IX violation, so, this CEO is an active liability for the company too.
Professionalism wasn't always wrapped up in bland, content-less corp-speak, and I'd be happy for more business communications to be more blunt and straight forward rather than more obscured.
But there may be a genuine idea here too. If you know you're going to downsize, letting people choose to leave will result in higher morale. It will also prevent some situations where the lay-offs caused those same people to quit anyway (but now the company is actually short some key employees).
But maybe Kraken managers are actually just assholes and the leadership is trying to pull off DHH.