Punishments, hostile environment: Inside Ola Electric’s workplace culture

The workplace culture inside Ola Electric has turned hostile over the past couple of years, according to over two dozen present and former Ola employees, who chose to remain anonymous, interviewed by news agency Bloomberg.

The former and current employees of Ola claim that in meetings CEO Bhavish Aggarwal tore up presentation papers and meetings were cut short because he would get angry about either sentence constructions or quality of the paper itself.

Employees said there were instances where Aggarwal used Punjabi epithets at staff and told teams they were ‘useless’.

When asked about his working style, Bhavish Aggarwal in an interview told Bloomberg, ” Not everybody is a fit for our culture. There’s no world standard on an even, sterile work environment,”

In another incident during a visit to Ola factory, CEO Bhavish Aggarwal reportedly asked an employee to run three laps around the several-acre-large Ola Futurefactory because an entryway that was supposed to be open was shut.

Aggarwal told Bloomberg anger and frustration were ‘me as a whole.’ He said he wants to build companies with lasting impact, even if that means rubbing some people the wrong way.

“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 said.

Zilingo’s former chief financial officer Ramesh Bafna, decided not to join Ola Electric days after formally accepting employment offers, the report added.

The 37-year old has big plans for Ola Electric to rival the likes of Elon Musk’s Tesla and China’s BYD Company