Today, our CEO & Co-Founder, Rachel Romer, shared the difficult news with employees that we are restructuring and reducing our workforce as a part of a broader orientation of the company around our long-term strategy.
The following email was shared with all employees:
Team Guild,
I’m writing with a heavy heart today to share that we’ve made the difficult decision to eliminate 172 roles at Guild, as a part of a broader organization of the company around our 3-year strategy and 10-year goals.
This is my decision - one I take very seriously - and I want to first acknowledge the impact it will have on affected Guilders and their families. Our objective today is to best support all Guilders with this transition.
If your role is being eliminated, you have a meeting on your calendar today with a leader on your team and a People Business Partner to walk through what this means for you. This meeting is a discussion on how we can best support you and provide details about your severance package and benefits. You have my commitment, along with the full leadership team and the people organization, to support you in this transition.
Why we’ve made this decision
As you’ve heard in our company-wide strategy sessions over the last several months, we have collectively committed to orienting around our company strategy with a shared goal of building an enduring impact company that can scale Guild’s mission and business for 100+ years.
That goal - and the mandate to ensure Guild is built to last - catalyzed conversations about Guild’s organizational design for the leadership team. Those reflections led us to February’s reorganization around our strategic objectives, including the changes I made across Guild’s leadership team, largely across our senior leadership roles, as well as at the VP and Director levels.
Today’s actions are aligned with that structure and reorganization, as we further scale and focus our team to ensure Guild’s longevity and financial independence, and our ability to serve current and future generations of members.
How we made our decisions
With Guild’s long-term goals as our guide, we identified the go-forward structure, roles, and skill sets needed to enable our strategy and create a more focused, seamless way of doing work at Guild. We also looked at systems, roles and processes that served us in our start-up days, but weren’t suited as we transition to a scale-up stage. We then designed the right organizational structure for Guild, resulting in new team designs and roles, along with the difficult decision to eliminate a number of roles.
While this process and the hard decisions we had to make are incredibly painful, I believe they are the necessary and responsible thing to do to ensure that Guild’s mission and model endures in a sustainable and scalable way.
I want to thank the People team for leading us through this very difficult but disciplined process that was aligned with our mission, our core values and our culture at Guild. We focused on:
- Leading the process with Guild’s mission and strategy as the north star
- Taking a principles-first approach to organizational design and decisions around roles and team structures, with a focus on eliminating bias and honoring our commitment to diversity and belonging
- Responding to feedback we’ve received on the need to simplify our organizational design and ways of working to succeed in our next chapter
- Doing as much as we can for those who are impacted today
Caring for those who will be leaving Guild
Speaking directly to those of you who are impacted today, I want you to know how much we value and appreciate your contributions to Guild. Moreover, we deeply value you as teammates and friends, and we are fully committed to supporting you through this transition and in finding your next opportunity.
Guilders whose roles are eliminated today will be eligible to receive a number of benefits and support, with a snapshot below and details to follow in today’s conversations:
- Severance: Minimum of 12 weeks severance pay, plus 1 additional week for each completed year of service at Guild.
- Vesting: 2-year extension to exercise your equity (versus standard 3 months). Additionally, for folks with less than 1 year tenure, your option grant will vest as if your monthly vesting started on your hire date, with no “first annual cliff.”
- Benefits: Medical, dental, and vision coverage through COBRA for up to 18 months, with Guild covering the premiums for the first 6 months.
- Guild for Guilders: Extension of your Guild for Guilders benefit for 12 months, through May 31, 2024. You will be able to enroll in new programs as well as continue in current ones.
- Job Transition and Outplacement Services Support: Job Transition Support provided by Guild’s Talent Acquisition team, and through external Outplacement Services Support provided by Mercer, plus support from the Guild Alumni Network.
- Technology: The option to keep your Guild laptop and other Guild IT equipment, such as monitors and keyboards.
- Ongoing Childcare: If you have a child enrolled in the Beehive, they can continue attending until they age out of the Beehive, with your existing tuition subsidies. Additionally, you will continue to have access to all of Helpr’s core care service, provider network, and backup care hours for an additional six months.
- Financial Wellness: You will be able to access your Origin financial wellness benefit, for an additional six months at no cost to you.
This week’s focus
Today, our leadership and people teams will be focused on caring for and supporting our exiting Guilders. For those of you whose roles are not impacted, we ask for your patience and grace as we focus on our exiting Guilders throughout the day.
After we move through that process, we are committed to sharing more details about other organizational, reporting or role changes over the next 36 hours, and we will also create dedicated space starting tomorrow to come together as teams and as a company, to answer questions and discuss future plans.
Finally, if you have questions or feedback for me or the leadership team as we go through this transition process, please share them at [email protected]. We will be sure to read and respond to all emails.
With care,
Rachel