In 2017, Uber abandoned earlier hiring practices and the stack ranking performance review system amid complaints that those practices were unfair. In July of that year, the company announced it was raising salaries for employees, and lifting the value of equity awards for some.

Liane Hornsey, then Uber’s chief of human resources, told employees in a meeting that as a result of the changes, salaries for men and women, and between white employees and non-whites, would be fair based on their job level, location, and tenure at the company.^N “Uber’s compensation approach has been similar to that of other pre-IPO companies, but as we’ve grown it’s become clear that we need to adjust our philosophy and continue to increase transparency going forward,” an Uber spokesman said at the time. “Thanks to feedback from our employees, we’re making the right investments to set ourselves up for the future.”^N

Managers were asked to set specific goals for each employee. These goals would be entered into a central system to ensure employees and managers knew what evaluations were based on. The company also added a “citizenship goal” component to encourage and reward people for helping one another. Managers were coached on how to give frequent, constructive feedback.

In addition, the engineering team adopted a promotion-by-committee approach that brought more people, rigor, and transparency into the decision-making.^N

For more on how Uber revised is performance review process, click here.

Instead of leaving promotions solely up to managers, Uber decided to ask managers to nominate people for promotions. An employee would then take that nomination and solicit endorsements from his or her peers. All of that material was then forwarded to the promotion committee for evaluation. The committees met twice a year. Pham explained:

The feedback used to be, ‘Well, my manager has too much power over me.’ And we said, ‘Okay, now let's take away the power from the managers and turn it over to a panel’ …  It’s almost like a jury. Let's say a level four going to a level five, every member of the committee has to be level five or above. You don't have peers trying to promote peers above them. We also have an appeals committee. If it gets rejected by the appeals committee, it's done. And so, we have a pretty fair process. Because of that, it restored the trust.

Uber’s rapid scaling meant that many people in management positions has zero or little experience managing — and were getting little coaching and mentoring on how to be good bosses. Recalled Srinivasan:

There were serious management issues because when we looked at our management bench strength; most people who were front-line managers were extremely junior. They’re doing it for the first time in their life. And they’re doing it in one of the hardest companies, when change is so fast. I feel like if they had all been managers at, say, Intel, they would all succeed — the company’s growing slowly and in the next five years, you hired two people, it’s great. But your teams have doubled, tripled, every year, and it was very hard. 

Uber did not hire an official head of human resources until 2014, when the company had 500 employees. Even then, former employees said the department focused much more on hiring and firing than on coaching and mentoring. In the first half of 2016, the company had only about 20 “human resources business partners,” who were supposed to train managers or handle things like employee complaints, for the company’s 6,000 workers.N 

Sokol said Uber fell into a familiar trap of deciding to make its best engineers managers. “We had accumulated management structures that just didn't make sense,” he said. “We had people in management positions that were just kind of like, ‘I don't know, they need a manager; I'm going to become the manager.’” 

Sokol recalled one engineer who was put in charge of running a dispatch initiative. After sitting in on one of his team meetings,  Sokol recalled:

I saw the chaos of the meeting and the inability and the ineffectiveness, and I could see the frustration in [this guy’s] face. I reached out to him afterwards and I said, “Let me know how I can help because I've got some groundings in management, that's what I was hired to do here, and I just want to help you if I can.” He was like, “Dude, take it.” He was basically just looking for an out and felt compelled to sort of run the management side of things when he really just wanted to be an engineer. He's since left the company and could never be happier and never wants to go back into management. So what happens in most companies in hyper growth is the best engineers become managers and they sometimes are good at it, but most of the time they’re not and then they're not happy. But it’s a bad situation for us to end up with bad or ineffective managers and losing your best engineers at the same time.

Uber needed to begin the process of removing those unhappy managers from their positions, Sokol said. “Finding the right spots to sort of extricate those engineers from those roles in a smooth way and sort of pat them on the back for holding the ship together is essential for the long-term success of any company,” he said.

Toward the end of 2016, Kalanick hired Google veteran Liane Hornsey to lead HR operations, and the company said it would add 30 to 40 more people to her team. Then, in fall 2018, the company launched a corporate education program. 

Between October and December, more than 6,000 out of Uber’s 15,000 employees signed up to take eight classes in leadership and strategy, taught by Harvard professors.N The effort was led by Frances Frei, a former Harvard faculty member who became senior vice president of leadership and strategy at Uber in June 2017, just weeks before Kalanick resigned as CEO.N 

Frei taught the courses via video, in a system based on one Harvard had developed called HBX. One class, called “Build and Rebuild Trust” focused on an airline from the 1980s that needed to reestablish itself as a trusted brand. Another focused on leadership lessons from ancient Rome. To ensure employees around the globe could take part, each four-hour class was repeated three times, including an overnight time slot at 2 a.m. 

Frei told Forbes she was pleasantly shocked when one-third of all the participants turned in voluntary reflections on the lessons. “Because it was a pilot, we were just figuring out could we do it. And in reading the reflections, I’m blown away by how people are reflecting on it and now we’re seeing it in their work,” Frei said.N

A number of senior executives in Uber’s engineering organization had long felt some discomfort with the framing of one or more of Uber’s 14 corporate values, which were promulgated by CEO Travis Kalanick in 2015. Among those regarded as particularly problematic were “Let Builders Build” and “Always Be Hustlin.’ ” 

As Pham explained, “Let Builders Build” became weaponized. “It became an excuse for teams …  a justification to do whatever they wanted. … ‘Get out of my way. Don't tell me what to do. Let me do what I want,’” he said.

Similarly, said Srinivasan, “Always Be Hustlin’ was used as an unspoken justification for sometimes taking questionable steps to meet a business goal.

“Truly what Always Be Hustlin’ meant was you’re never going to have enough resources to truly solve the problems you want to solve in a startup. … You don’t have engineers, you don’t have machines, you don’t have people, you don’t have the money. What do you do then? The answer is to be more resourceful. Right? To be more efficient would have been a better way [to say it]. … But fundamentally, things were broken.”

--Ganesh Srinivasan

Srinivasan wondered whether part of the problem was that Uber’s leaders had waited too long to articulate any values.  

“I feel the cultural values  in this company had been established too late. By the time we did it in 2015 … there were close to 7,000 or 10,000 people in the company if you include all the operation folks and everybody else,” he said. “The challenge with that is you’ve already hired a bunch of people. It’s like you brought everybody into a large congregation and then you discussed your religious affiliation. It’s not going to work.”

Individual managers like Sokol sought to start making cultural changes within their own teams.  Wanting to build trust among his direct reports after joining the UberEats team, Sokol tried to import a new sense of values.

 “I got in front of the whole team and said, ‘We’re going to treat this as a family. … It's going to get weird and you're going to yell at your brother, you’re going to yell at your sister, and then you're going to figure it out. And it's okay to get weird and it's okay to show emotions,’” he recalled. “This was totally different than the still-hard-charging, win, win, win at all costs mantra that was being preached on the other side.”

Even before Dara Khosrowshahi was named CEO, Uber’s board took very visible and public steps to start to change Uber’s culture — both for the sake of employees, and the company’s public image. In a speech to Uber employees in the spring of 2017 , board member Ariana Huffington said:

As all of us who were involved in the listening sessions heard from so many of you, many of Uber’s 14 cultural values, while well-intended, had been allowed to be weaponized. That was a word we heard a lot. And that’s completely unacceptable — any cultural value or principle, however well-intended, that is used as a weapon needs to be changed, clarified, or supplemented.

As you’ll see, the report has recommended a wholesale review of the cultural values and how they’re being used in practice. … In the meantime, we’re going to start by changing a few right away — they are both symbolic and significant, because they reflect the changes that need to be made.

First is the one about “working longer, harder and smarter.” Working smarter is great, but Uber is a company that respects data – and what we know from the science and the data is that working longer isn’t the way to work smarter. So working longer will be gone from the cultural values.

Another one that’s gone is being “always on.” Because the data also tell us that being “always on” and always available means being unfocused, distracted, reactive, and always stressed and burnt out, and as a result, often acting out. We need to change that — you don’t need to be available all the time. The Uber app always responds, but the humans that build and manage it shouldn’t.

We’ve also changed the cultural value of “toe-stepping,” which is one that many had mentioned was weaponized. You can decide what takes its place, but whatever it is, it will reflect a work environment in which everybody feels comfortable offering up their ideas, and also one in which nobody feels afraid to speak out about any conduct they feel is disrespectful.N

When Khosrowshahi took over, one of his very first acts was to announce a new set of cultural norms for Uber. He wrote a post published publicly in November 2017 on LinkedInN:

Uber’s new cultural norms:

• We build globally, we live locally. We harness the power and scale of our global operations to deeply connect with the cities, communities, drivers and riders that we serve, every day.
  
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• We are customer obsessed. We work tirelessly to earn our customers’ trust and business by solving their problems, maximizing their earnings or lowering their costs. We surprise and delight them. We make short-term sacrifices for a lifetime of loyalty.
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• We celebrate differences. We stand apart from the average. We ensure people of diverse backgrounds feel welcome. We encourage different opinions and approaches to be heard, and then we come together and build.
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• We do the right thing. Period.
  
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• We act like owners. We seek out problems and we solve them. We help each other and those who matter to us. We have a bias for action and accountability. We finish what we start and we build Uber to last. And when we make mistakes, we’ll own up to them.
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• We persevere. We believe in the power of grit. We don’t seek the easy path. We look for the toughest challenges and we push. Our collective resilience is our secret weapon.
  
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• We value ideas over hierarchy. We believe that the best ideas can come from anywhere, both inside and outside our company. Our job is to seek out those ideas, to shape and improve them through candid debate, and to take them from concept to action.
  
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• We make big bold bets. Sometimes we fail, but failure makes us smarter. We get back up, we make the next bet, and we go!

 A few days later, Khosrowshahi discussed the situation with CNBC correspondent Andrew Ross Sorkin, saying there was a lot of work to do, but he was optimistic about the future of Uber.

“The culture went wrong, and the governance of the company went wrong, and the board went in a very bad direction. But if the product is good, and you can bring in good leadership… you can bring it together. And I think we are on our way.”  

— Dara Khosrowshahi