Unacademy layoffs 1,000 employees as cost cutting exercise

Unacademy has sacked around 1,000 employees as part of its mega cost cutting exercise. Employees including on-roll staff and contractual educators have been sacked in the past few weeks. Last week the startup asked around 600 employees to leave. The company is downsizing amid an impending slowdown in venture funding and tightening of the overall economic environment.

The break of the 1,000 sacked employees is such that about 300 were educators on contracts, while the rest were in sales, business and other functions. Most of the laid off staff was a part of the content sales and business development teams for the core Unacademy test preparation product.

In a statement, an Unacademy spokesperson said that the company was building a culture of high performance and transparency. “Based on the outcome of several assessments, a small subset of employee, contractor, and educator roles were re-evaluated due to role redundancy and performance, as is common for any organization of our size and scale,” it read.

However, the view amongst the employees is different. Nearly half a dozen affected employees claimed they were kept unaware of the cost cutting exercise. They shared that no feedback was given to them about bad ratings or performance.The staff was given just an hour to accept the company’s offer of 2 months’ severance. Further, the staff said that Unacademy has not helped them with outreach to find new jobs.

One of the persons said that they were expected to work 12-14 hours every day and if they didn’t, they were asked to make a decision to leave. “There is a lot of pressure and toxicity in the workplace,” the person added.