I joined Remote in April 2022 with high levels of motivation, love, and admiration for the company. The opportunity to move back home to my family without making significant sacrifices was greatly appreciated.
Initially, my experience with Remote was positive, with good performance reviews, excellent sales feedback, and satisfied clients. Unfortunately, I found myself being unexpectedly laid off on the in June. To this day, clients reach out to me on my personal WhatsApp to seek assistance related to Remote, expressing their dissatisfaction with the current experience. This further reinforced my concerns about the company's decisions.
In January, Remote implemented a split for hybrid AEs, creating hunters and farmers teams for new business (NB) and existing business (EB) respectively. However, the execution was poorly handled. The implementation in late December and early January caused delays in account assignments and led to unethical practices, with hunters closing EB deals that should have been handled by farmers. Shockingly, 36% of my team's revenue came from EB, despite our targets being based on NB. C-level management recognized the challenges faced by AEs in Q1 and acknowledged that the implementation could have been better. In several all-hands meetings during Q2, our CRO apologized for the lack of coordination that hindered our success. While a few individuals excelled, many of us, including myself, faced difficulties because we adhered to the rules and did not close any EB deals.
The real turning point came when my manager joined in April. From the outset, our relationship was marked by conflicts. She exhibited manipulative, conniving, and two-faced behavior. In our very first meeting, she hinted at and threatened my job security due to my Q1 performance, which did not match the previous year's outstanding results. It was disheartening to start a managerial role on such a negative note.
This manager displayed a complete disregard for asynchronous work, imposing strict oversight on individuals experiencing a challenging quarter. She required detailed 40-hour work matrices to scrutinize our activities and offered trivial advice on time efficiency. She regularly checked everyone's calendars, provided unnecessary checklists for daily tasks, even when deadlines were weeks away; in sum: treated AEs as if they were children. Strangely enough, the CEO himself, in a Dutch podcast, explicitly expressed his disapproval of such management practices, calling them "very strange."
Furthermore, she publicly shamed lower-performing team members during meetings, highlighting their poor metrics and comparing them to top performers, despite the fact that the latter relied heavily on Existing Business for their revenue. Unfortunately, I fell into the low performer category when she joined in April, and her strong dislike for me, bordering on personal, became evident.
Her manipulative tactics reached an extreme when she tricked me into a 1:1 meeting with her and HR by pretending to be too busy to attend our weekly sessions. She requested that I prepare a document to present to her in the next meeting, only to use it as a pretext for terminating my employment within three minutes in the middle of the quarter. Considering I was fired just six weeks after her appointment, with no prior warning, it strongly suggests that this decision was personal.
While C-level appears preoccupied with diversity initiatives (of which I am a part), HR conducted an ad-hoc exit interview at the time of my termination. I mentioned feeling somewhat alienated at times due to the team predominantly consisting of individuals from a specific nationality. Curiously, as soon as I mentioned this, HR abruptly stopped taking notes and decided to conclud the call. It turns out, she shared the same nationality, which raised questions about objectivity.
Truly is a shame how I geniunely loved this company and what it stood for, did my best to present myself perfectly, just to encounter 1 person to spoil it all. Ironically, if Remote lives by their values - I would recommend it in a heartbeat.
