Uber is facing internal staff unrest as it attempts to implement a three-day-per-week return to office (RTO) mandate and stricter sabbatical eligibility.
An all-hands meeting late last month descended into acrimony as staff flooded the online meeting chat with queries about why the mandate was being enacted. “How is five years of service not a tenured employee? Especially when burnout is rampant in the org,” read one message that was reviewed by CNBC.
Following the meeting, Nikki Krishnamurthy, Uber’s chief people officer, issued a memo saying staff had “crossed an acceptable line” during the call. It’s unclear if there has been any disciplinary action to date.
But the dissatisfaction displayed during the call wasn’t a one-off; the general demeanor of the company’s 31,100-person staff has dropped in recent months, says one Uber employee who was on the contentious call. (The staffer was granted anonymity to speak freely about the organization’s morale.)
“I felt it from the performance review/promo cycle,” the staffer says. “I heard a lot of complaints about unfair evaluations. I’ve been a top performer since I joined, and I got a similar evaluation. So it wasn’t personal to me. But I had senior and staff friends leaving.”
That general malaise and unhappiness came to a head during the heated all-hands meeting last month. The return to office was discussed on the call, and received badly by Uber staff. “The messages were flowing crazily fast,” the anonymous staffer told Fast Company. “The general discontent was crystal clear,” they added, but the scale and speed at which comments were being typed made it difficult to keep track. “I even tried to download the chat logs, but they are not available to download,” the employee explained.
On the call, a recording of which was obtained by CNBC, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said: “We recognize some of these changes are going to be unpopular with folks.” Krishnamurthy deemed some of the employees’ responses “unprofessional and disrespectful.”
