Ola employees have revealed that founder & CEO Bhavish Aggarwal’s ruthless and aggressive behaviour at work has upset board members and staff, according to a Bloomberg report. Bloomberg talked to a few of the former and present employees at Ola who said that the culture has turned hostile over the last couple of years. They informed that in meetings, Aggarwal had used Punjabi epithets at staff, ripped up presentations because of a missing page number, and told the teams that they were ‘useless’. Employees said during the Bloomberg interview that meetings scheduled for an hour often lasted 10 minutes because Bhavish Aggarwal would lose patience over ‘a superfluous sentence in a memo, a crooked paper clip or the quality of printing paper’.
“The workplace culture inside Ola Electric has turned hostile over the past couple of years,” told the employees, who chose to remain anonymous, to Bloomberg. In one of the incidents, according to the report, the Ola CEO asked an employee to run three laps around the several-acre-large Ola Futurefactory, for not leaving open a shuttered entryway that should have been left open.
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Bhavish’s relentless ambition & management style
In a recent interview with Bloomberg, Bhavish Aggarwal had said, “Passions and emotions run high and we are not on an easy journey. But I don’t want to choose an easier journey for myself or for Ola. My anger, my frustration — that’s me as a whole.” He had said that he wanted to build companies with lasting impact ‘even if it meant rubbing some people the wrong way’.
Ola CEO had said, “India can surpass rivals not just by making cheaper EVs, but also by cultivating a global footprint in 5G, green energy and sustainable mobility.” Progress in achieving those goals, is ‘the yardstick the world should judge us by’, he had added. When asked about his management style, Bhavish Aggarwal told Bloomberg, “Not everybody is a fit for our culture. There’s no world standard on an even, sterile work environment.”
Retention at Ola, has been a problem, particularly at the C-suite level. In one of the instances, former Zilingo chief financial officer Ramesh Bafna decided to not join Ola Electric days after formally accepting the offer. Another former business head at Ola likened expectations at Ola Electric to ‘having to run a marathon like Usain Bolt’. Earlier this year, Ola had revealed the concept images of its first electric car.