Punishments and deadlines: Inside Ola Electric's hostile workplace culture

Interviews with current and former Ola Electric employees paint a picture of a workplace culture that 'turned hostile' over the last couple of years

'Not everybody is a fit for our culture,' Ola CEO Bhavish Aggarwal was recently quoted as saying in a Bloomberg report. Perhaps, this culture is what has propelled the ride-sharing platform to its current status as India’s largest ride-sharing company.

However, interviews with current and former Ola Electric employees paint a picture of a workplace culture that "turned hostile" over the last couple years.

Complaints from employees, who either witnessed or were subject to incidents, point to a "relentless pace and management style" - one that irked a number of managers and board members at Ola Electric. As per the Bloomberg report, around three dozen senior executives working across Ola Electric and ANI Technologies Pvt, which runs Ola’s ride-hailing operations, quit within a year or two of joining, a higher turnover rate than peers.

Aggarwal has also been described as “super intense” and “brutal” in terms of calling for unplanned meetings in the middle of the night at “1 am or 3 am”. In an interview last month, Aggarwal described the company as one where "passions and emotions run high". "My anger, my frustration — that’s me as a whole," the Ola chief had said. Employees reportedly said that Aggarwal "ripped up presentations because of a missing page number, hurled Punjabi epithets at staff and called teams 'useless'". Run-on sentences in memos, crooked paper clips, quality of printing paper are other things that have miffed the CEO resulting in hour-long meetings being cut short to 10 minutes.

Read | Ola's Bhavish Aggarwal India’s answer to Elon Musk, Tesla?

Unrealistic deadlines, lack of room for autonomy or opinions, and unplanned meetings well past midnight are other issues that senior Ola Electric employees have had to endure, Deccan Herald reported in May.

Aggarwal started his business career in ride-sharing more than a decade ago, a time when the startup was "an exciting place to work at", former employees have described. Today, retention reportedly seems to be a problem, particularly at the C-suite level. As per the report, some executives, including Zilingo’s former chief financial officer Ramesh Bafna, decided not to join Ola Electric days after formally accepting employment offers. Another former employee compared expectations at Ola Electric to “having to run a marathon like Usain Bolt".

A former employee in May told DH that when the company was gearing up for the rollout of Ola e-scooters "after pulling ahead (the) deadline by some time, Aggarwal further cut the deadline by two to three more months". While the top engineers were focused on delivering a strong product despite the earlier deadline, "once the deadline was cut further, we knew it cannot happen”, the employee said.

“There’s no major success without sweat and tears,” Aggarwal was quoted as saying in the Bloomberg interview. In the same report, Bloomberg described an instance at Ola Futurefactory, where the CEO on a visit spotted a shuttered entryway that should have been left open. Reportedly, the company founder immediately meted out a punishment: run three laps around the several-acre-large plant.