When town halls become occasions for complaining about your employer

One year on from the Google walkout, it's become apparent why employees at the tech company were unhappy with last month's alleged attempt by Google to create a tool monitoring employees who create a calendar event with more than 10 rooms or 100 attendees: Google staff have apparently been organizing their own, seditious, town hall events.

So said a series of tweets from the Google Walkout Twitter account today. Commemorating a year since the original Google walkout in protest against 'sexual harassment, misconduct, lack of transparency, and a workplace that doesn’t work for everyone,' the Twitter account is purportedly run by staff at Google. In a tweet, it said that 15,000 Google employees viewed a rebel company town hall hosted by the walkout organizers.

Google employs around 100k people, so the implication is that around 15% of its staff have an at least passing interest in issues behind the walkout.

@GoogleWalkout goes on to claim that employees across Google and in the technology industry as a whole are becoming increasingly organised and willing to protest against issues they disagree with.

Most large organizations - banks included - run their own town halls as a means of communicating with staff. With the exception of the occasional awkward question, town halls are typically occasions for pep-talks and the dissemination of positive messages about company strategy. Banks will be hoping Google's parallel town halls (which would, in any case, never occur using banks' own communication systems) don't catch on.

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