I agree the optics don't look great. But, honestly: our company screwed up and that screw-up shouldn't look good. It's going to be a long, complex walk for us to even begin to make up for the pain some people experienced. I think it's a worthwhile walk and so-far I think we're mostly making steps forward. Give us a few years and let's see where we're at.
Quick reflections back:
1) I agree with the general notion. What I see that you don't see is that there are a lot of internal cases that have been acted on at very high levels. It didn't matter that they were considered important for the business at all. The way the process is set up with the external firm doing the auditing, I don't know how anyone could protect someone. Basically I trust an impartial well-funded external law firm which only has the incentive to find issues to be the best at finding these issues. They found something, but it wasn't fire-able. I basically trust the process because I've seen it have larger consequences for other senior people...
2) I think there are many reasons why the DFEH might have put that press release out. I think we will eventually find out who was right when our response to that goes through.
3) The arbitration one is not so weak for me... I think our arbitration policy is about as employee-focused and fair as you get--employer pays for the arbitrator, folks can talk about their process, they can take their own lawyers into it, it's binding, and its prosecuted with exactly the same laws and penalty as court. On the flipside, a corporation can afford very, very expensive lawyers and an individual cannot. I think it also avoids a lot of other collateral damage to the organization, such as people who are not involved in the case getting dragged into court, sometimes for many years or having their private information put into the public domain without a say--such as their salaries, which could shape their future employment at another company--and that's even if the case is settled or regardless of their involvement with the issue. I'm OK with it, but not everyone is. And some of the people who were not walked out about it--and continue to be able to have a voice about their disagreement.
4) Internal response to the walkout was even to cancel meetings at the same time to allow people to go if they wanted to--so I completely agree that it was pretty commendable. To clarify my intent with my comment, it was not to diminish the amount of pain that people have. My point was that the walkout was about arbitration, but it seems like the internal response to the arbitration conversation was only able to drive about 5%-10% to walk-out about it, and that many of those folks who went to that walk out mentioned that they went to support their friends. Arbitration did not appear to be a lightning rod divisive issue at Riot according to those numbers. I am pretty certain that many of that 5-10% passionately hate the policy. I'm not diminishing their right to that, but I am saying that they're not the majority and most people were pretty OK with our policy after our CEO stood up in front of the whole company and spent 2 hours explaining why and telling people they could walk out about it.
Long and short of it, we are going to have to live with this for many years. And the only way out is for us to have a fantastic culture in this regard. I'm cautiously optimistic.
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