Can you imagine being fired for being too stressed at your job? India-based startup Yes Madam pretended to do just that with a fake, viral email from HR. All to raise awareness around employee burnout.
This one hit home.
Work-life balance is often a selling point to employees for startups. They’ll offer unlimited PTO, office snacks, and flexible work schedules. And while most companies claim that employee mental health is top priority for them, their actions say otherwise.
The long hours building a company from scratch can be unrelenting and those office snacks don’t hit the same when you’ve come in seven days in a row.
In the early stages of building a company, there is so much work to be done and taking PTO becomes stigmatized. Suddenly, what appeared to be a fun, exciting job slowly turns into the bane of your existence.
So it’s an important cultural conversation. But creating a misleading post to raise awareness is also problematic, as Yes Madam learned this week.
What was in the fake Yes Madam email?
In the viral email, the HR team said that workers who admitted to being stressed via internal company survey would be terminated effective immediately.
The body of the email highlights how Yes Madam is committed to fostering a healthy and supportive work environment.
“We have made the difficult decision to part ways with employees who indicated significant stress. This decision is effective immediately, and impacted employees will receive further details separately” HR Manager
The screenshot of the email made its rotation all over the internet. People were outraged by this scenario and couldn’t believe what they just read. Yes Madam didn’t respond to any media inquiries on Monday as the post went viral.
What did Yes Madam have to say about this?
Yes Madam broke its silence and issued an official statement on LinkedIn late Wednesday. The post said that no one was actually fired and the social media posts were pre-planned.
Yes Madam insists this marketing tactic was to increase employee burnout awareness. It went on to clarify that any employee experiencing significant stress was given a break to reset, recharge, and rest.
“In today’s hyper-connected world, work-life boundaries are fading, stress is widespread, and productivity often overshadows employee well-being.” Yes Madam
Why would Yes Madam create a marketing campaign like this?
Yes Madam gained publicity and became a trending topic. As they say, there’s no such thing as bad publicity. Many internet users have never heard of the company until the fake HR email.
Objectivity, this tactic did work as many new eyeballs are now familiar with Yes Madam. However, is it for the right reason and what they were hoping for? What does Yes Madam even do as a company?
In the short-term this is a win for brand awareness. Although, it can come at a cost long-term. Making a fake layoff email post seems bizarre. Especially when job security is so fragile nowadays.
This strategy just seems distasteful to do and overall a bad move long term.
How did the internet respond?
“Never heard of YesMadam before. Now I know YesMadam is a company that fires their own employees for a PR Stunt.” one user responded to the LinkedIn post.
“Let us make a PR campaign off layoffs they said. It will be fun, they said.” one added.
“So are we supposed to believe that the actual employees who claimed that they were indeed fired were all just in on an elaborate PR stunt?” one questioned.
“I wasn’t aware of YesMadam before, but now I know about it for all the wrong reasons.” one commented.
We’ve reached out to Yes Madam.
Internet culture is chaotic—but we’ll break it down for you in one daily email. Sign up for the Daily Dot’s web_crawlr newsletter here. You’ll get the best (and worst) of the internet straight into your inbox.
