Context
In February 2017 engineer Susan Fowler published a 3,000-word post detailing systemic harassment and HR failures at Uber. The post triggered a Holder Report, the firing of 20 employees, the departure of multiple senior executives, and ultimately the exit of founder-CEO Travis Kalanick. Dara Khosrowshahi arrived to a company in crisis.
Decision
Khosrowshahi did three things in sequence. He rewrote the cultural norms in plain language with internal participation. He restructured the People function to report independently rather than through any product or business unit. And he made the first cultural decisions slow and public — including a deliberate, drawn-out IPO communication process that signaled the company was no longer optimizing for speed at any cost.
Consequence
Within 18 months Glassdoor scores moved from 3.6 to 4.1. Voluntary attrition in product and engineering dropped. The IPO in 2019 was bumpy on financial terms but uneventful on cultural ones — a meaningful change from 2017. The company has not had a major cultural crisis since.
“Cultural turnarounds work when the new norms are written with the staff, not for them.”
— the lesson, in one line
Lesson
Cultural turnarounds work when the new norms are written with the staff, not for them. Imported norms do not stick. Co-written norms with public commitments and structural changes to People function reporting lines do.
What most retellings miss
Moving the People function out of any product or business unit reporting line was the structural change that made the cultural one durable. Without it, the new norms would have been overridden by the next quarterly target.
Sources
HR Asia case studies are editorial analysis of public reporting and on-the-record interviews. They are not legal advice and do not reflect the views of the companies covered.
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The Uber 2017 turnaround case study on HR Asia is a masterclass in cultural reset. Cultural turnarounds work when the new norms are written WITH the staff, not FOR them. Imported norms do not stick. https://hrasia.co/cases/uber-2017-reset
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