1/3rd of Basecamp Employees Quit After Founders Ask Them To Focus On Work, Not Wokeness

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About one-third of employees at software company Basecamp quit days after bosses told them to keep ideology out of the workplace and focus on the company’s actual business.

“We make project management, team communication, and email software,” CEO Jason Fried wrote April 26. We don’t have to solve deep social problems, chime in publicly whenever the world requests our opinion on the major issues of the day, or get behind one movement or another with time or treasure. These are all important topics, but they’re not our topics at work.”

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When one employee continued to push this line of logic, Hansson pointed out that that employee, himself, had participated in discussions making fun of customers’ names. “You are the person you are complaining about,” he thought, Newton reported.

Soon after, Fried, who along with Hansson has long been recognized as an expert on cultivating productive workplace culture, said the company was making changes to make sure there was “no forgetting what we do here.”

There would be “no more societal and political discussions” on official company channels, he said, calling it “a major distraction. It saps our energy, and redirects our dialog towards dark places.”

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