Three weeks ago, Elena*, a Krakow-based customer support agent for digital banking startup Revolut, dialled in to her weekly catch-up call with her team leader. She expected them to discuss an ongoing project. Instead, a few seconds into the call, she was told she was being fired.
Elena was asked to pick between two documents: one said she was being terminated for underperformance, the other, a “mutual agreement”, offered her a small severance and stated she was choosing to leave the company of her own accord. She was shocked: two weeks earlier, she says her manager had assured her that her job was safe and that she was performing well. “I thought maybe I should speak to another institution for legal advice because I am a foreigner,” Elena says. “[But] they said I had no additional time and that I have 30 minutes to make this decision.”
Fearful for her career, Elena ended up choosing the mutual agreement. Elena is one of more than 50 employees in Poland and Portugal who it is claimed were pressured into leaving their jobs at Europe’s fastest growing fintech startup since the coronavirus pandemic struck. Their numbers are not included in the recent 62 redundancies announced by Revolut – because they technically agreed to leave. Revolut says redundancies represented three per cent of its staff. “It was pretty stressful. In my friend’s team two people were fired two hours before their shift [with no warning],” says a former staff member who was dismissed in May.
Current and former Revolut employees say staff were coerced into accepting terminations, even though the company had no legal grounds to fire them. Some say this happened after the company heavily pushed a voluntary scheme where staff were asked to sacrifice part of their salary in exchange for shares in the company.
Revolut confirmed that a small number of employees left the business for underperformance reasons, which are valid grounds for dismissal in Poland. These employees were advised of the reason for their exit orally and in writing in a meeting with their line manager and human resources manager.
The Krakow office in Poland is at the heart of Revolut’s operations: it is the company’s biggest office, and employs more staff than its London headquarters. Alongside centres in Lithuania and Portugal, it is the main support and compliance hub for Revolut, where everything from customer complaints to compliance work are dealt with by almost 1,000 staff. To service clients in several different languages, Revolut hires people from around the world and gives them residency permits. Before Revolut staff started working from home in response to the pandemic, at the Krakow office you could find people from a list of countries as diverse as Italy, Chile and India, on starting average net salaries between 3,500 and 4,000 zlotys a month (£700 to £800).
Now, some of the employees allegedly pressured to leave have been left stranded in a foreign country without a job or health insurance in the middle of a pandemic. While the Polish government has expanded residency permits until the “emergency period” ends, people from outside the European Union risk losing their visas once this special provision is over.
"I had some interviews but employers do not sound very promising due to the current crisis and unwillingness to provide documents for residence permits," Elena says. “The most unexpected thing for me is that my health insurance will terminate during this Covid situation. I don’t know what I would do if I get this virus.”
On April 14, a couple of weeks before Elena was fired, Revolut announced that it was trying to reduce potential redundancies through cost-cutting plans, despite having secured $500 million in new funding, pushing its valuation to $5.5 billion in February 2020. The company says these plans included a reduction in outsourcing costs and an “entirely voluntary” salary sacrifice scheme, where any employee could exchange part of their wages for twice their value in Revolut share options. The shares in the scheme are valued at $121.4015 per share - the value of Revolut’s last fundraising round.
According to a company presentation from May 11, over 60 per cent of staff opted into the scheme, which Revolut says will deliver around $900,000 in savings each month over the next 12 months. While some staff in Krakow and Porto say they were happy to participate, others say they felt pressured into opting into the scheme.
“People are scared all the time that someone will fire them. I spoke with a few guys and they told me they gave away ten per cent at least because they were afraid that in the end they will look for the employees that didn’t give the money back,” says a source within the HR department. “Obviously they don’t say we won’t fire [if you participate in the scheme] but in the end the message was a bit like that. If you sacrifice money we’ll stop firing people.”
In a message sent to the 495-strong customer support team on Slack shortly after the salary sacrifice scheme was announced, head of support Inna Grynova urged them to participate. “So far, almost 20 per cent of our employees globally have submitted their sacrifices. In Support we’ve gathered only 44 submitions [sic] (out of 495 employees) which is a very small number,” the message read.
“Our goal is to use SSS [salary sacrifice scheme] as an alternative to the need of employees redundancy and other cost cuts. So the success of SSS depends on all of us. If it won’t be enough, unfortunately we would need to go for the other steps, which we’ll try to avoid. The positive impact of SSS can be achieved only when we work together.”
Other managers and team leaders sent similar messages in the days prior to the closing of the scheme. Documents sent to staff say that as long as it is in line with local laws, employees can sacrifice as much as 100 per cent of their salary. But in at least one of Revolut’s main jurisdictions this scheme could be illegal, according to Filipe Lamelas, labour lawyer and assistant researcher at Portugal’s Collaborative Laboratory for Labour, Employment and Social Protection. “According to Portuguese law, base salary cannot be reduced even by agreement.”
A Revolut spokesperson admits that Portuguese law prohibits reductions in the “base salary”, and the company is “still reviewing the best way to offer a scheme that offers an equivalent benefit to salary sacrifice in Portugal”.
There is no suggestion that salary sacrifice was undertaken in Portugal illegally. Those that opted into the scheme were not necessarily saving their own jobs or their colleagues’. Decisions to fire staff had already been drawn up before these cost-cutting plans were announced, one source within the HR department claims. Days before the scheme was unveiled, a list with dozens of names of people that were to be fired was drawn up by heads of departments and senior HR executives, they say.
In Poland, workers say they were told by their line managers and HR that they were underperforming and would be terminated if they didn’t leave voluntarily. But in Portugal mutual agreements stated that dismissals were a result of a reduction of 40 per cent in the group’s activity and a 30 per cent excess in staff numbers. By getting employees to voluntarily leave, Revolut has avoided launching a group redundancy consultation, that, among other things would give employees the right to severance payments and the chance to be offered alternative roles within the company. “[Mutual agreement] is better for Revolut because they can’t go to labour court [employment tribunal],” says the source from the HR department. “The way they prepare the terminations are so bad that if someone would go to court Revolut would lose,” the source claims.
WIRED reviewed the testimony of employees and the documents given to them by Revolut with lawyers in Poland and Portugal who said the company could have acted unlawfully.
Polish employment lawyer Grzegorz Ilnicki says the termination agreement given to Elena was not only missing key details required by law, but that forcing her to choose between that document and a “mutual agreement” could be illegal. “There are some verdicts in the Supreme Court in Poland that presenting these two documents to the same worker could be a criminal threat. The threat is that if you don’t sign the mutual agreement we will terminate you because you are a bad worker,” he says. A Revolut spokesperson says the company has respected local labour law requirements at all times.
In Portugal, the company asked employees to quickly sign mutual termination agreements without informing them that they had no legal obligation to do so. One employee says a colleague was blocked from accessing her email and other associated work accounts during a meeting with her manager and HR. Since she would only sign the mutual agreement if the terms were improved, the company was forced to reactivate her accounts the next day so she could continue working.This kind of activity could be considered harassment, according to Lamelas. Revolut says that all exits in Portugal were carried out legally.
This wouldn’t be the first time Revolut’s practices have risked falling foul of employment law. Last year it was revealed that the company was asking applicants for business development and PR roles to recruit customers for free in order to have a chance at getting a job. Andrius Biceika, the then head of business development and one of the executives that used this hiring practice, has since been promoted to interim chief people officer, the most senior HR role within the company, according to his LinkedIn profile.
The company has also been criticised for an almost religious adherence to key performance indicators (KPI) for every role, from HR, to recruitment and compliance.
As coronavirus hit global travel, one of the key sectors that Revolut relies on – daily active people using the app – fell from 1.3 million on February 1 to 0.9 million on March 28, according to company documents seen by WIRED. This translated to less activity for many of the teams operating out of Krakow, Porto and Vilnius, including, but not limited to, the customer support team.
Despite this drop in activity, the KPIs that were expected from employees were not dropped to match it. People that worked in the customer support department were still expected to do 60 chats a day to hit their target, even though at times no customers were online making requests to the support team. Some departments, like the compliance department’s “know your customer” team even had their KPIs increased, a former employee claims.
A Revolut spokesperson says its “performance management systems” aim to support its employees in “achieving their best at work and offer training and guidance”. They add that employees “may leave the business if they are not making progress in their role”.
As lockdowns have started to ease in some European cities, activity amongst Revolut users has picked up again, returning to 1.1 million daily active people on May 9. That has meant that the workload has increased again for the customer support team, with a backlog of around 1,000 people regularly being left queuing for assistance, according to screenshots seen by WIRED.
“Now we are always with a backlog because a lot of people were fired,” the Porto-based customer support agent says. “I think they did things too quickly. And why? Because they don't care about people.”
*Name changed to protect identity
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
