This 14-Month Old Ecommerce Startup Fires 60% Employees; 160 Employees Asked To Leave, Suddenly

While shedding about 60 percent of its entire workforce, Indiabulls’ e-commerce platform, Yaari has laid off around 150 employees, over the last 30 days.

Why Would This Happen?

 It seems the online platform is readying itself to merge with Dhani Services which is another Indiabulls’ company, according to sources.

Further adding that “The management took an overnight decision to shut down business operations of Yaari and shifted us to Dhani division,”.

The employee said, “A few days later I got my termination letter,”.

Three other employees of the company also confirmed the development.

So far, Yaari has not released any statement in this regard.

How Did This Happen?

“In the month of April, they started giving us individual calls on WhatsApp saying that there are some critical issues going on in the company and asked us to put in our papers,” said a former employee on the condition of anonymity.

It appears that the company did not send them any official email fearing they may use it against the firm, said employees.

“When I denied their request, they suddenly asked me to shift to another city in a matter of two-three days. When I asked them to extend the period since I was not well and needed some more time to shift, they reported that I was not up to the task anymore and put me on a performance improvement programme (PIP) for seven days,” said another ex-employee.

According to him, seven days is too short for a PIP, claiming that companies put non-performing employees on such programmes generally for about 30 days and above.

Further adding, “May 12 was decided by the company as the review day to check if there is any improvement in my performance, and out of fear of being terminated I decided to resign voluntarily,”. 

So are the many other employees.

No Notice Period And Performance-linked Incentives

It appears that Yaari did not give its employees any notice period and asked them to move on immediately. 

Besides this, a former employee claimed that she did not receive the salary for about 1.5 months and performance-linked incentives of around Rs 1 lakh as of May 31.

It had to be paid by the end of March.

Not only her, but all her team members were asked to resign, apart from a female co-worker who has a kid, she claimed.

The situation got intense when another colleague from the Delhi office said that when refused to resign, he was directly handed the termination letter and asked to stop working with immediate effect.

Growing List Of Lay Off

With this Development, Yaari seems to join the growing list of companies laying off employees. 

In this financial year, so far startups have laid off over 5,500 employees citing a funding crunch. 

Here mentioned Yaari is run by Yaari Digital Services, is a subsidiary of Indiabulls and is listed on the stock exchanges. 

The company’s stock ended 1.22 percent down on May 31 on the National Stock Exchange at Rs 36.40 apiece and has fallen over 60 percent since the start of 2022.