I made a bullet point list of all the problems which Twitter is facing right now, with this information coming from multiple sources from within Twitter. You called them "assumptions", basically minimised them and expected me to prove it.
So then you make make an even wilder statement that Twitter has "doubled its traffic" since the Musk buyout, it turns our it's sourced from within Twitter and rather than you holding yourself to the same standard, you essentially tell me to disprove your statement. *sign* This is a huge double standard.
Sure, it was meant to be done to "shake things up" but it was done in Musks usual impulsive "react first, think later and clean up the mess" way. And changing the business culture as fast as possible is the worst thing you can do. The frog needs to be cooked slowly.
Just to give some background, I have worked in very large (10 of thousands of hosts), enterprise IT infrastructure environments for 20 years in companies of all sizes. My career followed the technology; first from bare metal servers, through to virtualisation in the late 00s, and finally to the current abstraction layer - "cloud". During this time I also moved into senior Operations Management roles managing numerous DevOps teams managing significant AWS resources which underpin critical SaaS solutions - obviously not at the scale of Twitter, but I understand the enterprise-scale technology and job markets in these areas very well.
I have been involved numerous mergers and acquisitions during my time, participating both as the acquired company and also working in the role to perform post-acquisition integration of people and all physical/digital assets, resources and IP.
Now of course, when a takeover occurs, the entity (company, person) taking over
always has a bias towards thinking that the acquired company must be grotesquely over resourced. This is almost always partly true but also part arrogance on the part of the incoming CEO ("Of course no one could run a company as efficiently as me"). This is why redundancies are basically expected regardless of circumstance or outcome.
Here is a structured corporate strategy to drastically reduce a workforce in a similar time frame to Musk without all of the negative outcomes:
- For a good part of this process, secrecy is absolutely imperative. Bring in a number of trusted individuals who are highly skilled in business analysis, communication, and however many subject matter experts (SMEs) you need to provide advice and assessment of all the technical niches in the company.
- First, perform a financial analysis of what the ideal head count is or budget for employees looks like - this will help you drive the rest of the progress in an organised fashion and will set clear success/failure criteria.
- Benchmark every employee's current salary to determine if they are below, at or above industry standard for their role in their particularly geographical location.
- The Business Continuity Plan (BCP) should be consulted when trying to reduce the HR foot print of the organisation in the most extreme examples such as what happened to Twitter where you expect entire role categories or departments to be destroyed. This document outlines for every role/function in the company, how long the company can correctly function without a role type (hours, days, weeks, months etc) before major risks or incidents may arise if these roles are reduced below a critical threshold.
- Based on the BCP, create a role vs weighted risk matrix to identify the roles and/or departments which can be made redundant whilst creating the least operational risk. Complete this analysis for the entire organisation whilst aiming for your success/failure criteria for savings defined earlier.
- You now understand your target HR budget, you know the most critical roles for business continuity, the individual salary benchmarks, and the relatives risks based on roles. You can now begin your cull.
- First, An innocuous sounding communication to all employees needs to be crafted by the external experts you bought in but sent out by the trusted internal comms staff, detailing that company profitability is problematic and management is considering all ways in which the company can meet financial requirements (setting soft expectations in the company employees that a cull will occur).
- First cull model to implement is Last-in-First-out (LiFO). The newest members of the company have the least organisational experience, will not be fully contributing yet, generally have the least rights under employment law and represent the least risk of them being exposed to sensitive IP. They are also the least likely to have established strong relationships in the company which might negatively impact culture and will appear as "fair" to the longer tenured employees.
- Second cull - Get rid of many of the middle managers, except those which previous analysis has determined to be critical. These managers are most likely to promote the agendas and culture of the previous executives, have disproportionately high pay and provide you with the next opportunity;
- Using previous performance and peer reviews, promote the highest performing and best paid team leaders to replace these outgoing middle managers. These new managers will have the respect of their teams and you will not need to raise their salary to anywhere near what the previous middle managers were consuming. Then replace all these team leads by promoting the highest performing team members to team leads to replace their upwardly-mobile colleagues.
- Next, send out a secondary communication to all employees again crafted by the external experts you bought in but sent out by the trusted internal comms staff, detailing that due company profitability, a number of new staff members and middle managers have been let go. Emphasise all the internal promotions you have made to replace them, from team leads and all the team members who are now newly minted team leads. Hurrah!!
- Now, the major cull. Based on performance reviews, cull an many low-mid performing employees from ALL departments in ALL Business Units up to a number still within acceptable BCP thresholds, having your newly promoted team leaders and middle management perform the actual dismissal of those former colleagues they had been carrying as dead weight for ages. This will demonstrate loyalty to the new vision. (except for teams such as HR, PR/comms, recruitment and legal which are critical to this process).
- Now you involve your new mid level managers and team leaders in the communications to let their teams know of the difficult decision THEY have had to make by removing all their low performing colleagues from the teams whilst emphasising those left are the absolute best. The team members will respect and trust their former teammates.
- Have HR, legal and finance complete all the documentation and severance payments and gag orders etc for all those made redundant.
- Once complete, cull finance, legal, HR, PR, admin etc of all but the very highest performers.
- DON'T let your new CEO issue ultimatums about all the extra work the staff have to do. This above process has retained all the highest performing employees, who are generally the most engaged. Give them intellectually interesting projects to work on and they will work their own asses off. TELLING them to do this will create the opposite impulse
jamezr:
This optimal method can be completed within a month or two and has ensured the following has occurred (instead of the impulsive, undirected, potentially illegal, PR nightmare it actually was):
- It has been done in an orderly way, with clearly defined financial goals set.
- It is done privately and not in the public spotlight.
- The BCP analyses done has ensured that the organisational risk has been minimised based on the people selected to go (and that the wrong people haven't been fired and embarrassingly rehired PUBLICLY)
- There has been effective communication and updates to the company from their trusted comms staff, minimising confusion, gaining trust.
- Middle managers, most likely to be sticklers for previous culture and process are removed. these are also most likely to be the most disliked employees.
- New leadership has promoted high performing Team Leaders into these middle management roles, who would be very popular and trusted with their previous team members.
- New leadership has promoted high performing team members to replace these upwardly mobile former Team Leaders.
- Morale is boosted by the announcement of all these promotions
- Significant amounts of team members across all business units have been booted by the new middle managers and team leaders, effectively making them accomplices and invested in the new vision
- Once their usefulness has expired, all low performing ancillary staff are booted from HR, PR, Legal, Admin etc.
It has also been completed in a very discriminatory way, ensuring the best talent is retained.
