Basecamp: The Work-Life Imbalance

Basecamp designs software that helps other companies manage productivity.  It’s so good they use it themselves!  A component of Basecamp is the group chat feature called “Campfire.” It’s designed to allow employees to have informal conversations about anything and everything.  Turns out that feature was a problem within Basecamp’s offices.  Their employees were using Campfire to discuss racial inequality and political issues.  The bosses felt that political and social conversations were distracting people from vorking (if you know, you know) and making money for the company.  So they told their team to stop with the commentary and just focus on vorking.  They more than suggested, they made new rules forbidding such conversations on the company’s platform.  Fair enough, it’s their private company, they can do what they want.  The problem is that the bosses had originally allowed the employees to create a Diversity, Equality, and Inclusion committee to look at the company’s behavior and protocols to determine if there were any racial issues at play.  When the bosses pulled the plug on the political/racial chat (as well as a few other health and wellness benefits), they also closed down the DE&I committee. The employees suddenly felt unempowered to do anything other than quit.  So 1/3rd of them quit and Basecamp is left asking itself a question for the ages: where did it all go wrong?