Relationship Status with Meta: ✉️ It's Terminated
This week, Meta laid off another 5% of their workforce.... By email at 5am. And then, adding insult to injury, branded it as a "performance-based separation" – a cruel PR spin that essentially hung a "not good enough" sign around the necks of thousands of talented professionals.
The tech industry has a notoriously short memory. When the market shifts and companies start competing for talent again, there's often a convenient whitewashing of how they treated people during tougher times. Leaders who coldly dismissed thousands by email rebrand themselves as champions of workplace culture. Companies that used "low performance" as cover for business mistakes suddenly become vocal about employee well-being.
This is precisely why we need to both call out poor leadership when we see it and celebrate the companies that consistently do right by their people – regardless of market conditions. It's why we dig deep into companies like Kit (our feature this week), who have spent years building genuine, employee-first cultures. It's why we track and remember not just what companies say, but what they do.
Because here's the truth: layoffs are a leadership failure, not an employee failure. When a company over-hires or misreads the market, that's on leadership. When business units need to be deprioritized or restructured, that's a strategic decision from the top. Trying to rebrand these decisions as performance issues isn't just dishonest – it's malicious.
The talent market will inevitably shift again. When it does, we need to remember these moments. Not out of spite, but because patterns of behavior during tough times tell us far more about company culture and leadership than any number of glossy recruiting posts during boom times.
Until then, let's continue to celebrate the many companies who are doing things right!
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10 Fun Ways to Use Slack to Boost Your Remote Work Culture
While Slack empowers productivity and communication for remote teams, it is also a great tool for boosting your remote culture.
Here are 10 fun and engaging Slack channel ideas to bring your team closer together, no matter where they are in the world.
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Company Highlight
Kit (Formerly ConvertKit)
Meta's relationship status may be "It's Complicated" but Kit has been in a Long-Term Relationship with Remote Work. They are also a company that has special relevance to us here as it's the software that powers Work is a Verb!
Walk through Kit's virtual halls (so to speak), and you'll find a remarkable collection of side-hustling creators. Their team includes newsletter writers, course creators, and founders building their own ventures. Rather than viewing these side projects with suspicion, Kit embraces them - after all, who better to build tools for creators than creators themselves?
This entrepreneurial mindset flows naturally from Kit's approach to remote work. When you trust employees to manage their time and energy across different time zones, it turns out they become pretty good at balancing multiple pursuits. The company has developed unique systems for maintaining productivity and connection across their global team, while still giving people the flexibility to pursue their passions.
Want to join a company that supports both your professional growth and your side hustle? Kit is currently hiring for roles in marketing, engineering, and executive assistance.
Check out their full Remotivated Company Profile.
Our Friends at Roamr Just Launched on ProductHunt
Instead of my usual closing asking you to share Work is a Verb (and thank you to all those who have done so in the past!), this week I'm going to ask you to consider supporting our friends at Roamr. They are an awesome remote company, doing great things for the remote community and I have no financial affiliation with them whatsoever. Here's my ask:
🤔 Traditional work travel is broken:
- Employees dread it
- Companies overpay
- Hotels pocket the difference
Roamr is building a future of work travel that benefits everyone, and it’s absolutely brilliant in its simplicity.
If you want to support an awesome remote team, please head over to Product Hunt and give Roamr an upvote and leave a supportive comment. Most companies that reach the top of Product Hunt paid to get there, Roamr isn't doing that and is in third place for the day so let's push them across the finish line.
And of course if you travel for work at all, be sure to check out their website and sign up as well. They even post the actual TESTED internet speed at each property. I’m telling you, they thought of everything!