Earlier this week, Who Gives A Crap Co-Founder & CEO Simon Griffiths shared the following news with the Who Gives A Crap team.
Hi Team,
I have some really difficult news to share. Before I share what’s changing, I want to give you the context behind this decision. I will keep it short and simple.
Firstly, in terms of ways of working: As we’ve grown, we’ve brought in amazing people from around the world, regardless of location. That approach helped us build our global team quickly, but it has come at a cost. Despite everyone’s best efforts, working across time zones with limited overlap in our working hours has made it harder for us to do our best work. Coordinating even simple BAU tasks can be fairly challenging. Calendars are overloaded, and it often takes weeks, instead of hours or days, for live conversations to happen. This absorbs a huge amount of energy, and it’s clear that we’re currently not set up to thrive.
Secondly, this has a direct impact on how much we can donate. Not only can it be hard to do great work, but having our team spread across so many time zones also increases our operating costs - which means we are not donating as much as we could be.
As you know, we’ve put years of effort into trying to improve how we work. We have come to the realisation that to increase our donations and reach our goal of giving everyone access to clean water and a toilet, we have to rethink how we work and where roles are based.
Therefore, we’ve decided to restructure our team. There are two big changes:
We will be moving most of our global roles (ie. those teams that support all our markets) to the Australian time zone. This doesn’t change our commitment to local market teams - we are committed to highly effective and well-resourced teams in the US, UK and Australia, and will continue to invest in new markets.
We will be simplifying some of our teams to strengthen collaboration, efficiency, and ultimately, our ability to increase donations.
This means that we will be saying goodbye to a number of our amazing team members over the coming weeks and months.
This decision will affect 19% of our team, about 50 roles, which are based outside of Australia. We’ll be re-hiring almost all of these roles in Australia in the months ahead.
We know this is incredibly difficult news, especially for those directly impacted. You are all talented and valued teammates who have contributed so much to our mission - Who Gives A Crap would never be what it is today without you.
I want to be clear, this is a structural change. This is not about individual performance - you’ve all been extraordinary contributors, who do amazing work and genuinely care about making a difference in the world. We’re incredibly grateful for each of you. It’s not about the company being in a financially stressful position - we continue to be economically healthy and growing. It also doesn’t change our continued investment in growth - this is a shift in our operating model, not in our ambition. It is a structural shift that we need to make to help us do better work and secure the long-term success of Who Gives A Crap.
Ultimately, this decision is a realisation that the structure and hiring strategy that served us historically is now under strain. We need to make a change to help us do our best work and reach our long-term goal of giving everyone access to clean water and a toilet. It’s a decision that we own as founders.
We want to make every effort to stay true to our values through this transition, especially our ‘Give A Crap’ value, so we can do our best by all of you.
This is in how we show up: We will be transparent with all of you and share information thoughtfully.
It’s also in the support we offer: I know this will have a very real impact on people's lives, and we want to offer as much support through this as is possible. Each team member who is impacted will be offered at least 12 weeks of pay beyond their last day. We’re providing additional compensation for years of service, plus a payout of annual leave balances and parental leave where relevant, extensions to your healthcare coverage and we are accelerating vesting of your options to the next vesting milestone. We also want to support you with what comes next - we are investing in expert outplacement and coaching support, and will lean in ourselves to support you through your job search. We know this doesn’t take away the difficulty of what’s ahead, but we hope it reflects the genuine appreciation we have for everyone who has contributed so much.
This is a lot of information to absorb. Beyond joining meetings relating to how this affects your role, we encourage you to take the rest of the day off.
I’ll close by saying I’m truly sorry we’ve made this decision after bringing you into the business, and after each and every one of you have given so much to the business. Today will be a very hard day for all of you and for our team. Please take care of yourselves and each other today.
Thank you,
Simon