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Wednesday, March 1, 2017
Uber Scandal
Earlier this week, former Uber engineer, Susan Fowler published a blog post describing the sexual harassment she faced when she worked at the company. Even though she would report the harassment, she was essentially ignored by Uber's human resources.
A couple days later, The New York Times published an article solidifying her claims about Uber’s sexist and unruly culture after interviewing thirty current and former Uber employees.
How did Uber get to this place to begin with?
This scandal reveals classic problems many startups face when scaling.
Uber has grown exponentially. Uber was founded just eight years ago and in that time frame has already expanded to over 500 cities around the world and has billions of dollars in revenue. They were able to get there in part because of their relentless focus on the customer, innovation, and profits.
While that is good, according to the article, “the focus on pushing for the best result has also fueled what current and former Uber employees describe as a Hobbesian environment at the company, in which workers are sometimes pitted against one another and where a blind eye is turned to infractions from top performer.”
In order to successfully scale a company, never put profits and growth ahead of company values and culture.
When a startup is in growth phase, often times what happens is the company has to hire dozens or hundreds of people within a short time frame. They often have trouble finding a plethora of talented individuals or simply don’t have the time nor capacity to keep the job vacant for too long. Consequently, they often hire people that are smart, but might not reflect all of the company’s values. While the company might not think that’s a big deal, that’s a huge problem.
Companies should never hire someone that doesn’t reflect their core values one hundred percent.
Because the startup is in its growth phase, the individuals that they hire will often be a part of a hiring committee or interview candidates in the near future. If those individuals don’t reflect company values, they might like candidates that don’t reflect company values either, and the cycle continues. Consequently, a disintegration of the company’s culture and values occurs.
Similarly, often times, companies (even established ones) will keep a strong player on the team even if their actions go against the company’s value.
As you saw with Uber, both these scenarios can be detrimental to a business.
In order to be truly sustainable, companies must have a strong value-driven culture. Profits will rise and fall, but if a startup has a strong company culture it can weather any storm and continue to grow.
#StudentVoices
Written by: Suneil Kamath
Founder - Music of the Heart |
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