Ola under fire again: Employee suicide sparks fresh criticism of toxic work culture
Ola's artificial intelligence (AI) division, Krutrim, is facing intense scrutiny after a 25-year-old software engineer died by suicide, sparking widespread concerns about toxic work culture. According to reports, the employee was allegedly overworked, handling the workload of three people, and faced harsh management.
But this isn't the first time Ola and its founder, Bhavish Aggarwal, have faced criticism regarding work culture.
What has happened?
The alleged suicide of Nikhil Somwanshi, who was a machine learning engineer at Krutrim since August last year, emerged in a Reddit post on Thursday.
As per the post, Somwanshi was under a lot of pressure at work before taking the extreme step.
Ola, in a statement to ET, said Somwanshi was on personal leave at the time of the incident.
A former Ola Krutrim employee ET spoke to alleged, 'They are doing utterly mediocre work with incompetent management and leadership. Toxicity is through the roof, as is nepotism.'
Not the first time
Ola Cabs hit the headlines in 2022 when Bloomberg reported about the aggressive and loud behaviour of Aggarwal with staff. As per the report quoted by several publications, the entrepreneur tore up presentations and shouted at staff for small errors like missing page numbers.
Many employees had then termed Ola's work culture "hostile" and toxic. Many employees told the publication that Aggarwal lost his temper at work constantly and used Punjabi epithets at the staff, calling his team "useless" more than once. They also said he set unrealistic deadlines, sometimes way into the night.
It was also reported that Aggarwal made an employee run laps of an Ola facility after one entry gate was found to be open.
"Not here for a nice time"
According to reports, he responded to the report, saying that everybody is "not fit for our culture".
When asked about this in another interview with YourStory, Aggarwal said he can come across as a "rough and rude" person, but he's straightforward. During the launch of the Ola S1 in October, Aggarwal referenced the controversy. 'We're not here to have a nice and easy time. My own personal style is aggressive. We have a culture of high quality and high execution."
Over the years
Aggarwal has said he believes in "work-life harmony" but has questioned the conventional notion of weekends. When
Infosys
cofounder
NR Narayana Murthy
kicked off a viral debate with his support for 70-hour work weeks, Aggarwal supported him, saying that he works 20 hours a day "all seven days of the week".
Aggarwal has faced criticism for being very similar to Tesla and SpaceX founder
Elon Musk
, who has also faced criticism for fostering demanding work cultures. Both are known to set aggressive targets, which sometimes face delays or challenges.
After Musk took over the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) under the Trump administration in the US and asked federal employees to explain what they did in a day, Aggarwal followed suit.
He mandated that employees submit weekly reports detailing their accomplishments. Called "Kya Chal Raha Hai?" (meaning "What's going on?"), the initiative required employees to send Aggarwal and their managers a weekly update listing three to five bullet points of completed tasks, with no exceptions.
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