Move Comes in as a Response to Slow Growth.
The transportation network company, Uber, has dismissed 400 employees working in its marketing department on 28 Jul, Monday. The move has come about as the company copes with issues regarding slow growth rates and internal disharmony and dissatisfaction in the marketing team.
Uber did not respond to the queries of the media. However, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi wrote in an internal email that the company needs to address its slowing growth. The reduction in marketing team numbers is seen as one such step towards this issue.
The layoffs will be witnessed across the San Francisco based company’s global offices, which will cut the marketing team’s workforce from 1200 to 800. According to an SEC filing in June, Uber employs 24,494 employees globally. The dismissals will trim Uber’s workforce headcount by 1.6%.
The layoffs follow the stepping down of Uber’s chief marketing officer Rebecca Messina as she abdicated the previous post month as the company combined its public relations, policy, and marketing teams under the supervision of the senior vice president of communications and public policy Jill Hazelbaker.
In the internal email to employees kicking in the layoffs, CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said that slow growth is quite natural and it “happens naturally” as companies expand and get larger, but it’s still an issue which the company needs to solve as fast as it can.
Uber’s marketing department head addressed the issue of dissatisfaction among marketing team members. In another internal email, she wrote that she has “consistently heard that we have too many people with overlapping mandates” and also that there’s “deep dissatisfaction within the team,” more often than any other significant department in the company.
As a consequence of Uber’s internal decisions, its shares saw a dip of 1.4% on Monday. The dismissals are hoped to speed up the lingering growth rates.
Cited Article Sources:
https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/story/2019-07-29/uber-layoffs-marketing-jill-hazelbaker
https://d18rn0p25nwr6d.cloudfront.net/CIK-0001543151/daf455c2-1b30-4b98-869a-763fe0bfad02.pdf
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-07-29/uber-to-cut-about-400-employees-in-marketing-group?srnd=technology-vp
