Groupon Employees Are Angry, Company Deals With Declining Morale

Groupon’s IPO did not go over well and the social shopping website is now trading 63 percent below its original $20 per share, a fact that the Wall Street Journal reports is causing a large portion of the networks sales force to feel blue and even jump ship.

Morale at the company is so bad that a lawyer for Groupon sent Top Hat Monocle CEO Mike Silagadze a letter accusing him of improperly recruiting Groupon employees to work at his software company. In response the Top Hat CEO said Groupon employees were willfully leaving the company en masse because of extremely low morale at the social selling website.

Despite a Q2 profit of $46.5 million headlines against the company continue to remain extremely negative which has in part led to lowered morale. Throw in declining stock values, bad publicity over the company’s business practices and various other issues and employees are simply being beaten up by the open market of opinions.

One of the most telling reveals comes from Glassdoor.com where anonymous salespeople at Groupon have complained about being handed over-crowded territories, a commission structure that is constantly changing and sales goals that are impossible to meet in order to achieve sales bonuses. According to reports Groupon moved from paying sales people a few percentage points on each sale to a sliding scale that has caused commissions to plummet.

If the company loses many of its salespeople it could greatly reduce Groupon’s ability to generate a profit. According to recent filings nearly 45 percent of the company’s 12,000 workers are sales agents.

Group in May announced 100,000 merchants served by 5,400 salespeople, an average of 18 customers per salesperson.