The WhiteHat Jr, a platform that was acquired by BYJU’S in 2020 over 800 employees have resigned from the kid’s online coding learning Edtech start-up in the last two months after being asked to work from the office.
This has come after the company has asked its employees to return to office within a month’s time, according to an Inc42 report. On March 18, the company announced the policy to end work from home and asked remote employees to return to office by April 18.
The resignations came from full-time employees of the sales, coding, and math teams. More employees are expected to put down their papers in the coming months.
According to the media reports, a few employees termed the exercise a cost-cutting measure and some said that the company is giving just a month’s time to relocate which is not enough and the firm should have increased their pay for moving to expensive cities.
An employee said salaries also factored in the decision to not return to the office. At the time of hiring, employees were told about their job location – WhiteHat Jr has offices in Gurugram, Mumbai, and Bengaluru.
After working from home for two years, employees believed that their salaries should be revised to reflect the cost of living in expensive cities.
One of the employees who resigned told the website that a month’s time was not enough for relocation.
A former employee said, “Some have kids, some have aged and sick parents, while others have other responsibilities. It is not right to call back employees in such a short period of time.”
A former employee said, “This was a well-planned and managed layoff that WhiteHat Jr did.”
In 2020, WhiteHat Jr founder Karan Bajaj sold his 18-month-old start-up to Byju’s founder and chief executive officer Byju Raveendran for $300 million in an all-cash deal — over the video conferencing platform Zoom itself. Bajaj continued to lead and scale this business in India and the US.
