Wayfair CEO sends a harsh wake-up call to employees
The CEO recently informed employees that further blurring the line between work and life is the recipe for success and is pushing for staff to put in more overtime, according to an email Shah wrote to his employees, which was obtained by Business Insider last week.
“Working long hours, being responsive, blending work and life, is not anything to shy away from,” he wrote in the email. “There is not a lot of history of laziness being rewarded with success. Hard work is an essential ingredient in any recipe for success.”
Shah informed staff that this is a change that will be pushed for in the “weeks and months to come,” citing that the most successful people he knows follow this work culture.
“Everyone deserves to have a great personal life – everyone manages that in their own way – ambitious people find ways to blend and balance the two. I think that is what we all should do,” he wrote.
He is also encouraging staff to be “aggressive, pragmatic, frugal, agile, customer oriented, and smart” and to be more careful with spending company money going forward.
“I would also encourage you to think of any company money you spend as your own. Would you spend money on that, would you spend that much money for that thing, does that price seem reasonable, and lastly – have you negotiated the price? Everything is negotiable and so if you haven't then you should start there,” he wrote.
I hope Wayfair collapses and dissolves.
This is definitely a warning sign that it will. When your sales are down, and you are incompetent as a CEO, blame the workers, because that's never worked before in history.
A good CEO would be asking themselves, "what am I doing wrong that I need to fix? Where do I need to change?" Not, "I'm fine, employees just need to work harder and spend more of their finite lifetime on my success."
Edit because I want to expand on this a bit: What this CEO is doing is not based on metrics, so therefore doomed to fail. There are no metrics that would lead the company to say 'our workers are lazy, so we need them to not be lazy'.
There are productivity metrics, etc, but - and it's a big 'but' - if those metrics were accurate, they would show specific workers or bottlenecks in your company. If you, as a company, had reliable metrics that stated 'all of our workers are lazy' would you really be trying to keep them on, and just get them to 'not be lazy'? Of course not. This CEO is a fool who lives in a protective bubble.
The metrics they should be looking at: 'what's selling? what's not selling? What is our competition (you know, Wal-Mart, Amazon, Target and Costco) selling, because some of them are reporting great revenue numbers (like Costco this week just announced a fucking $15+ dividend and their stock shot up over almost 18% in the last quarter) doing? What are they (our competion) doing that we're not? Where are they weak that we can exploit?
If we don't know, why not? How do we find out?
NOT: "Our workers are just lazy, crack the whip."
Final Edit But This Should Have Been A Blog Post: What this CEO, Niraj Shah, is saying is "my plan is good, the employees just need to execute harder" when in reality he should have metrics to figure out if his plan is actually good since it's underperforming WayFair's competitors and determining if they should change direction. A critical part of the CEO's job is trying to predict the future and steer the company in that direction. When your prediction and plan fail to deliver, you'd better re-assess and quickly change course to adapt. The likelihood that his plan for 2023 was better than his competitors but somehow his employees just didn't execute is indicative of multiple systemic problems that are all his responsibility: If your plan wasn't being executed, why did you not know until the end of the fiscal year? If your employees are the problem, what is the flaw in your hiring and ongoing management? Are your metrics focused on 'butts in chairs' instead of actual productivity metrics? Is your own management circle reporting correct numbers to you? Do they know what they are doing? Is your competitors' plan working better than yours, and if so, how in the world woud 'executing harder' make a difference?