US-Based Firm That Signed Up Prince Harry Faces Discontent Among Its Employees - Media

Upcoming changes in the company’s coaches’ contracts reportedly led one of the employees to complain that the firm has essentially turned them into a “commodity”.

BetterUp, a mental health and coaching startup where Prince Harry signed on as the chief impact officer last year, apparently has a veritable "uprising" brewing among its staff, The Daily Beast reports.

According to the media outlet, the development comes as the Silicon Valley company is moving to modify the coaches’ contracts in a development that some of these coaches described as a "sneaky pay cut".

"I would say my heart is broken. And I think there’s really questionable ethics going on", one coach said, while another complained that the company has essentially turned them into a "commodity".

The upcoming changes that were recently announced by the firm involve a new rating system that would influence the coaches’ fees, with the coaches being retroactively evaluated "in part based on how ‘life-changing’ a client found their guidance and how frequently they met for sessions", as the media outlet put it.

“[If] I’m coaching a member, I don’t want to be focused on how they’re going to rate me", one BetterUp contractor said. "From an ethical perspective… we are there to coach the client, not to have them press the ‘like’ button".

Meanwhile, BetterUp has reportedly announced that they seek to modify their "original plans", with one company executive writing to coaches that "no one will see any sort of decrease in their effective session rate compared to their 2021 effective session rate".