Uber created his first large cut to his workforce, laying off around 400 staff worldwide, just over two months after putting his inventory on the government market. Chief Executive Dara Khosrowshahi said the firm was reorganizing its marketing department around the globe in an email sent to employees Monday.
“Many of our teams are too big to create overlaps, to make unsure decision-makers, and to produce mediocre results, Khosrowshahi wrote.” As a company, we can do more to keep bars high and wait for one another.”
The layoffs come just a few weeks after Khosrowshahi announced that Rebecca Messina, Uber’s worldwide marketing chief, was finishing her nine-month career at the business and Uber was combining her public relations and marketing departments under Jill Hazelbaker, who was then senior communications and public policy vice president. “Marketing is so crucial to our company and our brand remains challenged,” Khosrowshahi said in an email explaining the choice in June to merge departments.
Under Khosrowshahi, Uber worked to reduce his losses, which in the first quarter of 2019 amounted to $1 billion. In the first quarter of 2019, the firm spent about $1 billion on sales and marketing, up from $677 million the year before. Uber Chief Financial Officer Nelson Chai ascribed a portion of the rise in marketing spending to client promotions and other marketing costs, including headcount, during a conference call debating the outcomes of the first quarter.
“This rise as a proportion of gross reservations was mainly due to enhanced customer sales as well as enhanced headcount for advertising and marketing,” Chai said.
Before the decrease, the advertising team of the company had about 1,200 staff. According to Uber, the complete number of employees is 25,000.
According to messages sent to personnel by Hazelbaker and Khosrowshahi, the layoffs are intended to centralize the marketing attempts of the company.
“I have heard constantly that we have too many individuals with mandates that overlap,” Hazelbaker wrote in an email. “Decision-making is unclear, meaning that we don’t move quickly or deliver the company requires outcomes. We have replicated key tasks separately at regional (and sometimes nation) levels, leading to reinvention rather than iteration, as well as inconsistencies in the narrative of our brand. Finally, there is profound discontent within the team that demonstrates the results of Marketing’s Pulse Survey— the smallest ratings of any business team.
Uber staff may see comparable modifications across other departments as the business works to become leaner and quicker, proposed the managers.
“It’s also critical that we look at the large image, recognize that when we’re not where we need to be as a business and, most importantly, get back on track,” said Khosrowshahi in his email. “There’s a general feeling today that we’ve slowed down while we’ve grown quickly.”
“We can do more as a business to maintain the bar high and expect more from each other and ourselves,” he continued. “Simply put, we need to get back our advantage. Being quick wins; coupling that allows magic with powerful alignment and outstanding talent — and we need magic to accomplish our mission of world change.
