How do you perform well when all around you is psychological fear?
When you dread checking your email because you might find your termination letter waiting for you?
That was the reality in 2019 for employees at Revolut, a global fintech company.
An exposé by Wired would reveal that there was no psychological safety in Revolut. Everything was monitored and when performance wasn’t met, workers were fired on the spot.
An infamous Slack message from CEO, Nik Storonsky, captured the pressure that workers had to endure.
"I can definitely see from my side that KPI's are not met... all under-performers will be fired without any negotiations after the review... if you are significantly below expectations, you are gone."
In countries such as Portugal, Revolut required employees to sign mutual agreement documents to quit the company.
Under the intense psychological fear of getting dismissed, employees did what they could do best; overwork.
"I worked 12-14 hours a day, including weekends. It wasn't because I loved the mission, it was because I saw people disappearing from their desks every Friday and didn't want to be next."
A former employee would say.
Eventually, most workers reached their breaking point and left.
“When I joined [Revolut] there were seven country managers and only one was left a year later.” an employee said to Wired.
Working out of fear had a negative human cost. Many talented employees exited and the company had to retrain new ones.
However, others had found a way out of the psychological fear.
A few years back, in 2010, we find former CEO Mark Bertolini of Aetna, who was introducing some changes within his team.
Bertolini had partnered with Duke Integrative Medicine and they were introducing mindfulness practices for stress reduction.
"If your heart rate is at 100 beats per minute while you're sitting at a desk, you aren't thinking clearly. You're in survival mode. By teaching our employees to breathe and reset their nervous systems, we weren't just making them 'calm'—we were giving them their prefrontal cortex back."
