The Chicago-based company provided employees with a new social etiquette, but one-third walked in response. The CEO has now apologised.
Basecamp CEO Jason Fried has issued a statement apologising for what has transpired at his company in the days following a tweak to its internal policies. The changes, announced last Monday, included a ban on political discussions on its company Basecamp account. They were labelled as a ” new etiquette regarding societal politics by co-founder and CTO David Heinemeier Hansson. But not all staff were happy with the new etiquette, with reports from The Verge that one-third of the Chicago-based company’s employees had walked out in response. By Friday afternoon,18 of 57 staff had taken the co-founders up on their ramification-free severance package offer. “Last week was terrible,” Fried’s Monday blog post began. “We started with policy changes that felt simple, reasonable, and principled, and it blew things up culturally in ways we never anticipated.
