(OP’s comment)
I’ve been in contact with quite a few LMG employees. Many have given me statements about the abuse and sexual harassment Madison endured while working there.
One of them also gave me a recording of this meeting that was never supposed to be released. This is my proof that I have talked to LMG employees and have sources inside. I post this as verification of that fact.
I cannot out these people or give direct quotes out of fear they will suffer consequences, but I hope they come forward publicly even if it means risking their careers.
I can tell you their accounts match hers. And even go into further detail. One person constantly was mentioned more than others, but she’s not naming names so I won’t either.
She is telling the truth.
This meeting kinda goes along with how she mentioned her being sexually harassed was regarded as he causing drama.
Transcription by u/Elnachohat
Transcription if you’re having trouble hearing:
(speaker 1, Linus) So we called this meeting because it’s come to our attention that we need to have a quick chat about the best way to handle HR related feedback and rumors. We won’t be giving any names for what I hope are extraordinarily obvious reasons, but what we can do is give you the following guidelines for problem solving and conflict resolution.
Sorry that this is all boring and corporate, but here we are. Number one, always stand up for what’s right. We’re only a team as long as we’re all working together and working for each other. That’s the most important one. Number two, always reflect on your own personal experiences and use your common sense. Few things in life are truly black and white. Number three, always wait to hear both sides of a story before passing your own judgment. Be cautious when you know that one side is bound by legal and ethical disclosure guidelines, when the other is not. Carefully consider what it says about the character of someone who would engage in that type of gossip against someone who has no power to defend themselves.
Number four, always encourage openness and transparency. If you have a problem, you need to speak up. We want to fix it. If you receive feedback about somebody else at this company, the first response is, have you spoken with this person? Followed closely by, you need to speak with this person. We don’t solve interpersonal issues here, or really anywhere in your life, if you wish to live in a drama free zone, by engaging in water cooler politicking. So, if for any reason that individual is not comfortable approaching the person they’re having a conflict with, we have a chain that they’re supposed to follow.
So first, you advise them to take the problem to their manager. Followed by me or Yvonne, followed by our third party HR firm. I hope that you all trust that we’re here to make this a safe, fun, and productive workplace, and we won’t tolerate mistreatment of any of our team members.
If you have any reason to believe otherwise, then I refer you again to point number four, which is to address the issue with the individual directly, or bring it to me or Yvonne, or bring it to our third party HR firm. Since I’m not at liberty to share any details about what occurred, uh, all I can do is ask that you trust me and Yvonne.
Um, some of you know us very well, I’ve been here a very long time, um, some of you have not been here for as long, but I like to think that whether you’ve been here for nine years or nine days, you’re here for a reason and you believe that we are utmost to run this company with integrity and compassion.
Um, We can’t solve problems we don’t know about though, so on that note, I’d like to invite anyone who has concerns about a fellow team member or about a manager to submit their feedback either by speaking with their manager, me or Yvonne directly, or if you would prefer to provide your feedback anonymously, we have an option for that as well.
It’s the manager and co worker feedback form. Uh, Yvonne, if you’re not aware of it, show of hands who is not aware of it. Hey, a lot of people aren’t aware of it. Good, so now we all know. There’s an anonymous form, if for whatever reason you’re not comfortable, (inaudible) you can talk to me or Yvonne directly about it (inaudible) in the general chat.
It’s a safe space to provide us ideas for improvement, or if you’re consumed by the holiday spirit and you want to say nice things, you can do that too. Does anybody else have any questions?
Not a single questions? Wow, that must have been a really good speech.
(speaker 2, James)You gonna dance on that table, or just stand on it?
(speaker 1, Linus)That’s it! So, um, Yvonne, did you have anything you wanted to add?
(speaker 3, Yvonne)(inaudible) Somebody said (inaudible) if you guys want to sanitize your hands, help yourself with free (inaudible)?
(speaker 1, Linus)Yeah, that was actually just totally random timing. It came up the stairs a moment ago. Dennis is on it. Alright. Thank you everyone. Have a wonderful and, uh, productive rest of your day. And weekend.
EDIT: added who was speaking. Don’t know who speaker 2 is.
EDIT 2: I was told Speaker 2 is James
EDIT 3: Ivonne > Yvonne
EDIT 4: “near Yvonne directly” > me or Yvonne directly" and fixed that last thing Yvonne said
Sounds like a pretty standard meeting imo. Doesn’t that mean they haven’t committed transgressions or don’t need to change. But for a company of their size at the time there is nothing particularly wrong with what was said here.
There was a comment a bit similar to yours on the original reddit thread and I think it got a good reply by the OP. The main criticism was that their structure for escalating such problems is flawed. Talking to your manager about his/her misbehaviour isn’t exactly the solution here.
Yup. It seems to me that Madison’s case is one which anyone at LMG who cares, would not have been ok with, but that their policies have big enough cracks that it was still allowed to happen, and she didn’t have an effective way to get herself heard.
Wanting to do the right thing, doesn’t mean you automatically succeed in doing so.
Sure it’s not necessarily a good structure but it is super common in tons of corporations and they also have alternatives. They are giving themselves as an option if you do not have a particular problem with said manager you can talk to them about problems in the office. it is not necessarily ideal for handling everything and can have its issues But it is often a first line of defense for interpersonal employee conflicts. The company I work for and trust me its very large has a similar structure. People can talk to managers or they can call the 1-800 HR line. If they do talk to a manager there is a specific guidelines for how it’s escalated and reported within the company but trust me my company is much larger than LTT and they may not have those same policies in place yet.
I am not commenting on the allegations or who perpetrated them or what happened I want to make that clear. I am merely commenting on the fact that this meeting recording is nothing out of the ordinary. And is typically a structure you would see for a company this size and up. There were clearly problems in the system. And I am not going to discount anything anyone went through. And I sure hope these external investigations shed light on what exactly happened and the people responsible are held accountable. That said still don’t see much wrong here.
I don’t like that comment by op. This structure is pretty standard and I think it’s clear that if the manager was the problem that the options to discuss with higher ups or 3rd party HR are also there. Their comment that 3rd party HR is there to protect the company is also only a half-truth as letting these issues run rampant is a huge liability to the company itself (as we’re seeing right now). HR would not doing its job properly by pushing issues like these under the rug.
Even worse, saying that HR always takes the side of the employer is a meme that discourages employees in bad situations from pursuing their very real options. This perception could have continued to her situation. If HR doesn’t do their job, you can always escalate further.
If you’re ever in a situation, even at a corporate situation, where you don’t feel you can escalate an issue through the proper channels. You can always write a letter, certify it, send it to the company’s headquarters legal counsel and HR. You can do it anonymously, because it’s the mail which the company doesn’t have any control over, and you know they will get it. And because it’s documented and copied to three different departments they will act on it. You always have the method of anonymously contacting a company. If it’s an interpersonal issue, where you will be identified no matter what, you at least guarantee that there’s a paper trail.
If that’s insufficient to notify people then you should be consulting with a labor attorney.
That’s not the only option though. They could talk to her or the heads of the company. Yes they can’t work to manager too, but they have options.
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I’ve done so many years worth of manager training in California. One of the big things they drill into your head is you should always tell anybody to report things to HR or their manager, never “well did you first try to hash it out with the person harassing you?”
They said they don’t solve interpersonal problems with water cooler gossiping. It’s a long confusing sentence so I don’t blame you for missing that.
It sounds like you don’t have much experience in a white collar workplace.
2 and 3 are pretty standard rumor control parameters. And it is true, no workplace is in the business of solving interpersonal conflict, but what he’s speaking to is just lower-level things amounting to just not liking someone, not real problems like abuse or harassment.
Huge, huge difference between “ we understand that it can feel intimidating, but please speak to your manager, HR, or our third party service if you have a problem, as speaking with anyone else about the issue is actually counterproductive.” And “what does it say about the kind of person someone is, that they’d gossip about a coworker?” (Especially with the context that the “gossip” is a report of mistreatment)
He’s minimizing it. If it were truly just about low level gossip and ‘not liking someone’ they wouldn’t have this meeting.
It’s not ideal in a few ways, but I think the bigger thing here is at least one employee is willing to risk their job to prove that they agree with her and use the recording as identity proof
or that lmg records everything in that room for cases like that
One thing I noticed from a brief glance is that they mentioned that they have anonymous report form to the verge, while hiding the fact a lot of people are not aware such form existed at the time Madison worked there.
Just bad training and communication within the company. Things that need to be fixed
I think you are correct, this meeting in isolaton is fine. The indirect implications, however, is that this meeting constitutes the full internal review and response to an employee leaving in a disgruntled state. I obviously don’t know that is true, however the fact that linus has admitted to being shocked by the allegations suggests that a the very least an effective HR exit interview hasn’t happened.
If I was running a company, regardless of my position on personal care about my employees wellbeing, I’d want meetings such as the one in this post a routine. Not only ‘when something happens’. I’d want one on one interviews in the cases like this. So that when things like a former employee comes out with allegations like this I’m not shocked, because I already know and tried to deal with them reasonable or I have solid grounds to claim that reasonable effort was undertaken to know these things were happening.
I don’t know how it is in Canada, but C suite and board can have personal liability with duty of care to employees in Australia. Ignorance is not generally an excuse for a good reason.
If you’re at the point where you’re hiring an outsider to investigate, you effectively have an obligation to let them do their job. That means staying out of the way, because anything you do poisons their inquiry.
If you weren’t hiring an outsider and were investigating internally, you still wouldn’t talk about it in a fucking meeting until you know what happened. You talk to each person individually to get their account. “Interrogating” witnesses in a group both violates the privacy of the (alleged) victim and lowers the quality of their recollection of events because they get shaded by everyone else.
The fact that people weren’t aware of the appropriate method of elevating complaints is bad (though not as unusual as it should be). The rest is pretty standard.
There are a number of red flags here. ‘We can’t know about problems if you don’t tell us about them’ is bullshit. It is not on the employees to ensure that people don’t get harassed or mistreated.
The ‘sorry we have to be corporate’ at the start is also problematic. Dealing with toxic work culture is not ‘boring corporate stuff’ and leadership should not make that suggestion.
The whole thing feels like a teacher reprimanding a bunch of unruly teens about classroom drama. Which seems misguided at best. If your company is infested with gossip, badmouthing and harassment, it’s not because you happened to hire all the gossipy people, it’s because you’re creating a bad work culture that reinforces that kind of behavior, and you need to address that instead of blaming the people who work for you. Managers don’t go around berating colleagues for the heck of it, they do it because it is accepted normalized behavior. And that starts from the top.
There are a number of red flags here. ‘We can’t know about problems if you don’t tell us about them’ is bullshit. It is not on the employees to ensure that people don’t get harassed or mistreated
This is such a braindead comment. Even a company with an on-site HR team can’t know about something unless someone tells them. What do you think they’re like constantly reviewing cameras and recording all employee conversations or something? The first step is to speak up.
It absolutely does seem like they have a bad company culture. Even James comment was a little misguided. Once again not speaking on the allegations. But you have to remember this team grew from a very small personal relationship. There are going to be major oversights as a result of that. Especially when it comes to hr matters. It is absolutely horrible what happened and it’s even worse that it did not seem to be properly addressed. I hope they properly address these issues and course correct.
But your comment started inherently flawed. They genuinely cannot know or address a problem if someone doesn’t tell them.
This is such a braindead comment. Even a company with an on-site HR team can’t know about something unless someone tells them. What do you think they’re like constantly reviewing cameras and recording all employee conversations or something? The first step is to speak up.
There are quite a few steps to take before counting on people reporting sexual harassment. Train management properly and regularly. Make sure all layers of management are 100% aware of what kind of behavior is and isn’t tolerated. Immediately take action on small, seemingly insignificant incidents. Remove or lower any barriers to reporting incidents, etc. I’m assuming here that those things didn’t happen, as the company grew quickly and it was probably assumed by Linus that the chummy goofy atmosphere would just scale up and people would be decent to each other. That was a mistake. None of that is mentioned in this speech, nor is any future change in managing company culture. He’s basically blaming people for not using the channels that are already in place.
If anyone in that room was experiencing any form of bullying or harassment by their manager, they would not feel reassured by this speech, quite to the contrary. That’s a failure of management. Linus doesn’t seem to understand what a huge risk people take by speaking out, and how it’s not something you ‘just do’.
It’s good Linus stepped down as CEO since then, he is obviously not great at running a company this size day-to-day, but stamping out a bad culture is tougher than just switching out the CEO.
Well, those are certainly the correct words, but without an insiders feel for the tone and sincerity, hard to know if it was enough. I hope the perpetrators were appropriately punished/dismissed, but that is something we may never know (nor have any right to know). Hopefully if this is a widespread issue, then others will come forward.
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Yeah, that was very poor taste. I can only hope that someone called him out privately on that comment, but it does strongly suggest a cultural problem they need to correct.
This is some high school humor and if you watch any of the videos where James and/or Riley get to play off of each other, it gets really cringe really fast. It probably seemed innocuous enough when they were smaller but it sounds like James is too comfortable with his buddy Linus and has the same lack of awareness to take things seriously.
Yeah, I would have to agree, it’s the kind of thing that’s perfectly okay amongst close friends, but not in the broader public/workplace. The reality of growing to a company of their size is that they have to mature up as well. They probably should have had the new CEO a long time ago.
Do only strippers dance on a table in Canada? Because I would never think of strippers after that joke
That is an absolute disaster of a meeting. So much wrong there. Linus is 100% not trained for hr or equal opportunity.
FYI: if you aren’t trained for this or aren’t reading a script, DO NOT do an off the cuff meeting on it.
Especially if you’re the god damned boss.
This meeting hits all the beats I would expect from a good corporate HR response. What is missing? How would you run the meeting differently?
Some people have no experience in any office setting and are shooting their mouths off, and it shows. It’s just really easy to shit on whatever Linus says and does right now and watch all the nodding heads agree with you.
Not blame employees for your shitty work culture for starters. ‘If you don’t report it, we can’t know about it’ is a huge red flag.
Go talk to the person harassing you? Then your (possibly same person) boss?
No no no.
Not too mention the “dancing on the table” comment. Jesus Christ…
He gave generalized HR advice, and outlined three reasonable pathways to escalate a issue.
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Talk to the person you have a issue with (this is good general advice), solves many issues before they blow up.
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Escalate through a manager, requires more overhead and paperwork, but address times when you don’t want to talk to the person in 1.
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Go through the external HR organization for when 1,2 are insufficient.
This was good advice. It would have been nice had he explicitly said “If you the subject is your manager go through the external HR” - but the message is clearly there in the audio.
Nice. 😉
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There is nothing in this audio recording that I find particularly concerning other than James’ comment. It sounds just like a standard meeting that I would have had during a morning brief. Knowing the context of James’ comment was directed at Linus, who is a close friend, probably smirked and kept on going.
When you add the context of sexual harassment, it doesn’t look good and is an inappropriately timed joke. However, nothing about the meeting indicates that it was about sexual harassment in particular from listening to the audio. If I missed it, please inform me.
Maybe it is because I heard these types of conversations frequently, it doesn’t seem like a big deal. They even say you can contact a manager, Linus or Yvonne, or the anonymous hotline. So people have options if they have a problem in particular with leadership.
I am not dismissing that sexual harassment may have taken place, but from the context from the audio given, it doesn’t appear anyone speaking knows about it.
It does reinforce Madison’s claim that they want to keep everything verbal, rather than put things on record with HR.
This is a big red flag already. A proper record is needed by any good and fair company.
There is even more concerning part where Linus discussed the order of complaints - first the immediate manager, then Linux/Yvonne, and the only third party HR.
This is big no no for any reputable company. If you feel harassed, you generally go to HR directly, you don’t give managers any information.
Such managers are not equipped with HR related situations and by saying your piece to more people, you’re ensuring that people you complaint about knows that you’re making a complaint and they can use their power and sway you.
This is biggest issue for me in the video which essentially nullified the existence of HR in LMG if they are this far off to employees.
If you feel harassed, you generally go to HR directly, you don’t give managers any information.
That’s not how it works anywhere I’ve worked, including some very large companies. As a manager, my team Is supposed to come to me first unless they are uncomfortable doing so.
I’m not 100% sure about the companies you worked with, but I’ve to go through a lot of training videos in all my companies I worked with. One theme is consistent - you go to your manager when you’ve work related challenge, but as soon as it comes to sexual harassment, managers are not expected to be equipped in such things and thus approaching the right authority is utmost required.
Same thoughts here, I was hoping it’d be some slam dunk evidence to support the stuff we’ve heard but if anything it just makes the waters even murkier. There’s a 3rd party HR firm involved that she could have gone to? She said only Linuses wife was the HR there.
The audio also indicated that many staff members did not know about the anonymous option
Doesn’t look professional. Looks like a family run business meeting in the kitchen of a small restaurant where they blame the staff for all the problems.
The point of the release seems to be to prove that they have insider infoz not to say this audio release is damning. It just adds credence to other information.
Seems to confirm the fact that the complaints were not seen as more than gossip. This meeting sounds like a not so elaborate attempt at lid installation on a boiling issue.
I don’t quite get some of the responses in this thread.
I’m not here to defend Linus, I’m angry at him for whole lots of stuff that came out recently and earlier too, but if this recording is what we are solely supposed to go by, then I have to say he actually handled it well. What arose from the meeting is another issue, according to Madison nothing did, but I don’t quite see what you guys expected? You wanted Linus to call out the person in a meeting who harassed her?
As I’ve said before in other thread, not surprising.
