Wayfair CEO Niraj Shah tells employees to ‘work longer hours’ in year-end email::Wayfair CEO Niraj Shah sent a year-end note to employees, suggesting they work longer hours and do better at mixing work with their personal lives.
Wayfair CEO Niraj Shah tells employees to ‘work longer hours’ in year-end email::Wayfair CEO Niraj Shah sent a year-end note to employees, suggesting they work longer hours and do better at mixing work with their personal lives.
Even if you take the cuntish language away, if I were a shareholder I would be spooked by a leak like this.
Anyone, even VC’s and middle-management types that share memes on LinkedIn can tell you that “working smarter” is better than putting in long hours. The latter is a desperation move, usually kept for when goals aren’t being met, or when you want to mask the problem of poor planning, over-promising, or under-delivering.
If the CEO is coming out with rhetoric like this, it shows that things aren’t going well, and that any plans to correct course are probably misguided. It also likely points to future dissent in the ranks, as any good VP or SVP that isn’t in their position through ass-kissing would likely laugh this off and do their job properly, against the CEO’s direct call - the kind of person the shareholders would actively want in the main leadership role.
Sadly, COVID and a weakened economy have pointed out just how poorly many top companies are run. Whether it’s continuous layoffs, misguided RTO demands, calls to “do more work” from employees, or belittling your own IC’s, it’s probably a sign that the “old ways” of management are showing their flaws in a modern economy, and that new ideas will likely be what rules the market for the next 10+ years.