Someone I know spent eight and a half years building the research function at a mid-sized communications agency. This was not a short tenure or a peripheral role. It represented eight and a half years of institutional knowledge, client relationships, and a deep understanding of how the organisation worked.
One day, HR called. “Can you come with your laptop?”
He assumed it was another work discussion. Until then, it always had been. It wasn’t.
He was handed a full and final settlement and told the research function was being shut down. No warning. No transition period. No acknowledgement of what eight and a half years represented.
A week or two before, the company had announced its IPO.
What employees expected
When a company announces an IPO, something happens to the people who built it.
They feel, often for the first time, that the years of effort have produced something tangible.
That the late nights, the difficult clients, the projects delivered under pressure, the moments when they could have left but didn’t: all of it has culminated in something visible and public.
They don’t necessarily expect equity or even bonuses. What they expect, at minimum, is to be part of the moment. To be among the people who get to say: I helped build this.
One employee had joined just a few months before the restructuring. They had left a stable role elsewhere to join this company, presumably because they believed in what it was building. They were let go alongside everyone else. Whatever calculation the organisation made about its future did not include the cost of what it had asked this person to give up to be there.
What happened instead was a restructuring.
The research function was shut. The content function was shut. Executive and senior executive level employees were let go. People who had been with the company for years were handed settlements and shown the door.
The exact numbers remain disputed. External accounts suggest around 70 employees were affected. Internal sources place the figure closer to 35 or 40. Even the lower estimate represents a significant restructuring for a company of roughly 270 people. Either way, a sizeable portion of the workforce left in the weeks surrounding the IPO announcement.
CVs began circulating. Other PR agency owners confirmed they were receiving applications.
The industry noticed, even if the company said nothing publicly.
The ESOP question nobody asks
There is a broader question this story raises, one that rarely gets discussed openly in Indian corporate circles.
ESOPs have become a standard feature of growth-stage companies in India. The promise behind them is straightforward: stay through the difficult years, contribute to what we are building, and share in the value when it arrives.
That promise is only meaningful if people are still present when the value becomes liquid.
The timing of workforce reductions, relative to vesting schedules and listing dates, is therefore never an entirely neutral business decision. It carries information about what the organisation considers worth protecting. Whether that happened here is impossible to say.
But whenever workforce reductions coincide with a listing or vesting event, it becomes a legitimate question.
The reversal nobody talks about
Here is the part worth examining carefully.
If any of these employees had chosen to leave before the IPO, before the milestone was secured, before the valuation was established: what would have happened?
The answer is not difficult to imagine. Promoters in situations like this tend to feel betrayed.
They speak about loyalty. They remind people of what the company did for them. They sometimes go further: speaking to peers in the industry, shaping the narrative, making sure the person who left carries a reputation for abandoning ship at a critical moment.
In Indian corporate circles, leaving before a major milestone is treated as a moral failure.
But firing people after the milestone? That is restructuring. That is business logic. That is the natural consequence of a company becoming more efficient as it prepares for public markets.
The moral calculus is entirely asymmetric.
Loyalty is demanded from employees as a matter of character. Loyalty to employees is treated as optional, subject to business conditions, and never quite the same thing.
The promoter who might have questioned an employee’s loyalty before the IPO can, after the milestone, describe the same decision as restructuring. The language changes. The accountability rarely does.
How exits actually work in Indian organisations
What happened here is not unique to this company. It reflects a pattern visible across Indian corporate life.
When an employee resigns, particularly a tenured one, the response in many organisations is not professional. It is personal.
Access gets revoked before the notice period ends. The narrative inside the organisation shifts. Quietly, sometimes not so quietly, the departing person’s competence gets questioned. Their contributions get minimised.
Their flaws get amplified. The strategy is simple: rewrite the story before everyone else has the chance to remember it differently.
This strategy has a purpose. It prevents the exit from becoming contagious. It stops others from thinking: if they can leave, maybe I can too.
But it has a flaw.
People are not as easily managed as this strategy assumes. If someone spent three, five or eight years inside an organisation, colleagues already know what they contributed. They know whether the suddenly discovered incompetence is genuine or conveniently timed. Attempts to rewrite someone’s professional history often damage the credibility of those rewriting it more than the person who has left.
If someone stayed for years, they must have done something right. That is also, incidentally, why the exit stings the manager or CEO more than they admit.
What organisations forget
Years ago, a former boss said something that has stayed with me.
When you face a difficult decision, do what is good for the organisation. Not for yourself. Not for the immediate numbers. For the organisation.
And the organisation, he said, includes people.
Not as a sentimental idea or a line in a values document, but as an operating principle. People are not separate from the organisation. They are the organisation. Intellectual capital, client relationships, institutional memory and culture all live inside people. You cannot separate the asset from the person carrying it, discard the person, and expect the asset to remain.
A company that fires its Research Head of eight and a half years and simultaneously closes its research function has not merely restructured. It has erased a body of work and the person who built it, in the same moment, without apparent acknowledgement that these two things were connected.
What an IPO actually measures
An IPO measures valuation, growth and market confidence. It does not measure culture. It does not measure how people were treated while that valuation was being built. Those are different questions, and they are answered long before the listing bell rings. You can build a valuation on transactions. You cannot build an institution on them.
There is also a question for the investors and analysts watching this company’s public market journey. Culture is not a soft metric. It is a leading indicator of how management makes decisions under pressure. The choices made in the weeks surrounding this IPO announcement are data. Whether the market will treat them as such is a different question.
The irony the industry noticed
One more thing is worth noting. This is a communications company. Its business is advising organisations on how to handle sensitive moments, how to communicate difficult decisions, and how stakeholders experience public announcements.
What its own employees experienced in the weeks surrounding the IPO announcement is not something the company has addressed publicly.
The PR industry is not large. It runs on relationships, and it has a long memory. The people who were let go will find roles. Many already have. What travels with them into every conversation, every new workplace, every industry gathering, is not just their experience and capability.
It is a clear and firsthand account of how this organisation behaved at its most celebratory moment.
The industry is drawing its own conclusions.
The grace that costs nothing
There is a version of this story where the outcome is the same but the experience is different.
Where restructuring decisions, if they must be made, are communicated with honesty and some notice. Where eight and a half years of service is acknowledged as eight and a half years of service, not terminated with a settlement cheque and a cleared desk in the same week as an IPO announcement. Where the person who left a stable role a few months earlier to join this company is treated as someone whose decision to be here mattered.
This version costs very little. It simply reflects different choices about what the organisation believes deserves acknowledgement.
Every exit is not a bridge burnt. That is true for employees. It is equally true for organisations.
The people watching how an organisation treats the ones leaving are making their own calculations. They always are.
The question that remains
Indian corporate culture has produced extraordinary professionals. People who navigate complexity, absorb pressure and deliver under constraints that would defeat less resilient people.
But resilience has a cost. When it becomes the only acceptable response to organisational behaviour, it stops being a strength and starts becoming the mechanism that allows the system to continue without questioning itself.
The person I know who spent eight and a half years at that agency has moved on. They will build something valuable somewhere else, carrying with them everything they learnt and everything they experienced.
What they will not carry is any illusion about what mattered most when the company reached its defining milestone.
An IPO tells the market what a company is worth.
The way it treats its people during that moment tells everyone else what kind of company it has become.