Great people, bad leadership - Anonymous employee Sonder Employee Review

Thank you for your feedback. We completely agree that Sonder has a wealth of talented and hard-working employees. We’re saddened to read about other parts of your experience and want to address your concerns. While we were without a Head of People / HR for a period of time, we feel fortunate to have brought on an experienced VP of HR in the summer of 2020, who has been focused on supporting a positive and inclusive environment where all Sonder employees can thrive. The last year has been challenging for the hospitality industry, and that’s certainly true for Sonder as well. We hear you when you say we may try to blame your review on COVID-19, and we agree this is not a justification or excuse for every business decision. We want to acknowledge our response wasn’t perfect. With the lessons of 2020 in mind, we have updated our leadership principles and will soon be sharing a new mission statement, as well as clearly documenting our company customs, service principles, brand values, and commitments to all employees. To ensure that we deliver on our commitment to offering a world-class employee experience, we have laid out an ambitious plan for improvement with monthly milestones. We are also incredibly grateful to have welcomed many furloughed employees back, and have ramped up hiring to alleviate the workload of our teams. Francis and members of SLT have prioritized visiting our cities in person over the last year, as much as is safely possible, to make sure leadership understands the experiences of our front line employees. This will continue to happen -- likely even more frequently post Covid. We will also soon be launching “Day in the Life” profiles of individuals across the business to provide greater visibility into what it’s like to be on the front lines as a Hospitality Agent, Operations Manager, or otherwise. We hope these measures will help our folks at HQ make more informed decisions when making changes that affect the company. Thanks again for taking the time to leave a review. If you have anything else you would like to share with us, please reach out to hrbp@sonder.com.