Serious consequences for disruptive behavior
Googlers,
You may have heard about protests at some of our offices yesterday. Unfortunately, a number of employees hosted the event in our New York and Sunnyvale buildings. They invaded offices, damaged our property, and physically obstructed the work of other Googlers. Their behavior was unacceptable, extremely disruptive and made colleagues feel threatened. We have placed the employees involved under investigation and cut off their access to our systems. Those who refused to leave were arrested by law enforcement and expelled from our offices.
After an investigation, we have today terminated twenty-eight employees involved. We will continue to investigate and take necessary action.
Such behavior has no place in our workplace and we will not tolerate it. This clearly violates several policies that all employees must adhere to, including our Code of Conduct and our Policy on Harassment, Discrimination, Retaliation, Standards of Conduct, and Workplace Concerns.
We are a place of business and every Googler is expected to read our policies and apply them to how they behave and communicate in our workplace. The overwhelming majority of our employees are doing the right thing. If you’re one of the few people who thinks we’ll overlook behavior that violates our policies, think again. The company takes this extremely seriously and we will continue to enforce our long-standing policies to take action against disruptive behavior, up to and including termination of employment.
You should expect to hear more from leaders about standards of behavior and discourse in the workplace.
