Away's "Radical Transparency" Slack Culture: When Openness Becomes Surveillance

Away built its internal culture around “radical transparency” on Slack — open channels instead of email, public feedback instead of private conversation — and that same openness became the mechanism for round-the-clock monitoring, public shaming, and a policy of withholding paid time off as “accountability training.” The stakes were not abstract: when a single investigative report surfaced the internal Slack messages, co-founder and CEO Steph Korey stepped down within days, returned a month later amid public backlash, and was gone again within the year — a costly demonstration of how a transparency tool, deployed without guardrails, turns into a surveillance and control tool instead.

Away was co-founded in 2015 by Steph Korey and Jen Rubio, both Warby Parker alumni, and grew quickly on direct-to-consumer marketing and a signature hard-shell suitcase with a built-in phone charger. By May 2019 the company had raised a $100 million round that reportedly pushed its valuation to around $1.4 billion, according to TechCrunch and Forbes. Internally, Away ran almost entirely on Slack: employees said email was discouraged and direct messages were frowned upon, with most communication — including performance criticism — happening in open, company-wide channels, a policy Korey publicly framed as promoting inclusion.

On December 5, 2019, The Verge published “Emotional Baggage,” an investigation by reporter Zoë Schiffer drawing on interviews with more than a dozen current and former Away employees and screenshots of internal Slack messages. Former staff described being expected to work long hours with no overtime pay, being discouraged from taking paid time off, and having their work publicly criticized by executives in channels the whole company could see. In one widely cited example, Korey reportedly posted to the customer experience team’s Slack channel around 3 a.m., telling them she would help them “learn the career skill of accountability” by having another team randomly check their responsiveness three times a day, and that no new PTO or work-from-home requests would be approved “until we reach 5 consecutive days” of everyone being reachable.

The story spread within days. Away announced Korey would step down as CEO, handing the role to Stuart Haselden, then chief operating officer at Lululemon, effective mid-January 2020, according to CBS News. Korey moved into an executive chairman role and stayed on the board alongside Rubio. Responding to the Verge report, Korey said: “I can imagine how people felt reading those messages from the past, because I was appalled to read them myself. I am sincerely sorry for what I said and how I said it. It was wrong, plain and simple.”

Barely a month later, on January 13, 2020, Away reversed course: Korey returned as co-CEO alongside Haselden, a move that drew fresh criticism on social media from people who felt the company had simply waited out the news cycle, according to CNBC. The arrangement was short-lived: by mid-2020 reporting indicated Korey would step back again, and in October 2020 she formally exited the co-CEO role, remaining on Away’s board while Haselden ran the company alone, per Axios. The reshuffling unfolded against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic, which hit Away’s travel-dependent business hard — sales reportedly fell around 90% and the company furloughed roughly half its staff and laid off about 10% more in April 2020, according to Retail Dive.

The mistake was not using Slack, and it was not “transparency” as an ideal — it was collapsing the distinction between transparency and surveillance, and between candor and public humiliation. Away’s stated rationale — that open channels prevented the exclusion baked into private email threads — was a real and defensible critique of how information hoarding entrenches power in a company. But applied without limits, the same open channel that was supposed to democratize information became a stage: criticism of individual employees was broadcast to the entire company, turning ordinary performance feedback into public spectacle, and turning “everyone can see everything” into “everyone can watch you get humiliated.”

The second layer of the mistake was conflating always-on visibility with accountability. Expecting instant replies on Slack at all hours, and treating paid time off as something to be earned back through “accountability,” signaled that rest and boundaries were failures of commitment rather than normal parts of a sustainable job. That is a leadership and policy failure, not a Slack failure — the same tool could have been governed by rules that protected off-hours and routed criticism into private conversations. Away chose the opposite on both counts, at a company whose entire external brand promise was thoughtful, considerate travel.

Founders who build “transparency” cultures usually have real reasons: information hoarding, favoritism, and quiet politics are genuine dysfunctions in growing companies, and open communication is often the correct instinct. The trap is treating transparency as a value that scales automatically — assuming that because open channels fix one dysfunction (hidden decision-making), they cannot introduce another (public shaming, always-on pressure). Fast-growing, well-funded startups are especially prone to this: growth metrics reward speed and visible hustle, founders are praised by investors and press for “intensity,” and the same directness that reads as decisive in a boardroom can, unchecked, read as cruelty when broadcast to a channel with hundreds of employees in it. Away’s leadership was not unusual in believing hard work and directness were virtues; the mistake was never building a check on how those virtues were expressed at scale.

Transparency is a tool, not a culture in itself, and any tool that increases visibility also increases the potential for harm if it isn’t paired with rules about tone, timing, and audience. The company-agnostic version of the lesson: default to open information about decisions and priorities, but never default to open criticism of individuals — feedback about a person’s performance belongs in a private, dignified conversation, while the reasoning behind a decision can live in the open. And any policy that makes rest, time off, or boundaries something employees have to earn back is not a culture policy — it is a retention and reputational risk waiting for a reporter to find it.

The practical fix is to separate two things “transparency” often blurs together: the openness of decisions and the openness of criticism. A starting checklist for founders building always-on, tool-heavy remote or hybrid cultures:

According to reporting on the company at the time, Away discouraged employees from using email internally and pushed most communication, including feedback and requests, into Slack; direct messages were also discouraged in favor of open channels. Korey framed this publicly as a way to promote inclusion, since an email’s author controls who is copied while an open channel is visible to everyone.

Korey stepped down as sole CEO in December 2019, returned as co-CEO in January 2020, and stepped down from that role again in October 2020, remaining on Away’s board of directors while Stuart Haselden ran the company. Haselden later left Away to lead the outdoor brand Arc’teryx, and co-founder Jen Rubio has led Away since.

Yes — the reputational crisis landed right before the COVID-19 pandemic devastated travel-dependent retailers. Away’s sales reportedly fell around 90% in the early pandemic months, and the company furloughed roughly half its staff and laid off about 10% more in April 2020, with further cuts later that year, compounding the leadership instability.

This account draws on contemporaneous reporting, including Zoë Schiffer’s investigation “Emotional Baggage” in The Verge (December 5, 2019); leadership-change coverage from CBS News; Korey’s January 2020 return as co-CEO reported by CNBC; her final October 2020 exit reported by Axios; funding and valuation figures from TechCrunch and Forbes; and 2020 pandemic-era sales and layoff figures reported by Retail Dive.