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.
If you want people to check out and put in minimal effort, sending emails like this out is the perfect way to achieve that goal.
Says the corporate executive whose success is measured entirely by the hard work of others.
That idiot can fuck off far, far away. Preferably to hell or so.
I worked there as a software engineer for 3 years. They send emails like this all the time, 1-2x a year, it's not new. The company is bloated and everyone is "lazy" - in that they just hire willy nilly without any idea how to organize. Nothing will change there. There will be another email like this next year. None of it matters.
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?
So his employees can bring their kids to work, right ?
So don’t buy from Wayfair, got it.
...Is the 'harsh wake-up call' that they need to look for a better employer? Asking for your employees to push themselves harder is what we in the business call "Whining."
He could have made it much shorter: “If you’re not already looking for another job, start NOW.”
I'll paraphrase it a little more clearly:
"To all my best workers that have the highest skills and therefor the most job mobility: Now is the time for you to exit to a better organization leaving behind those that don't have the same options, opportunity, or ambition you do. While we'll not notice your departure for a few months because of inertia of the good systems you've put in place, rest assured when things start breaking or getting lost and we have no one left who knows how to solve these problems we'll scratch our heads how this all came to be while you're gainfully employed at a better organization with more pay and benefits not thinking about us at all."
But only salary staff who don't get compensated for overtime. Most companies would gladly take 100+ hours and only pay for 40 if they could get away with it
"Pay your employees overtime for off-schedule work, and allow for flexible scheduling so they can slide their normal working hours around to match real life," I said in reply.
I don't mind putting in the hard work and I do believe there's room for some amount of fuzziness between work and life. But I only get one life; I can choose another employer. If my employer runs me too hard, I'll just find another. My employer isn't going to take time away from my family, friends, or personal pursuits without compensating me. And there are some things I absolutely won't miss. Datacenter is melting down during my kid's play? You should have thought about that when you refused to hire additional support.
Saying I should be happy to put in extra work without expecting to be paid is like saying my employer should be happy to put in extra pay without expecting me to show up.
Even when I got paid overtime to work holiday hours during open enrollment it was not really worth the money. I'd come in at 6:00 am and work until 8 or 9 pm. I made really good money, but I had no life at all, and I could barely feed myself once I got home and crawl into bed to do it all again the next day. Money isn't the only motivator, and people aren't robots - we have a need for a break from the insanity now and then.
That sounds like too much, but if they wanna pay me overtime to answer an email and do 30m of work on Saturday when I'm not doing anything, I'd be cool with that if it was optional. If I see it and want to action it then $$$, otherwise I get to it on Monday.
SOME overtime I can see, and yes I never did mind going in on a weekend now and then. But too much overtime does lead to burn out and health problems, I've been through it myself.
What's really stupid about OT where I am, is were considered 'high tech' workers, so by law, they don't have to pay us 1.5x pay for OT. Only regular time.
Bullshit law.
Some places I've worked have used that rule, others have given the 1.5x.
You know, maybe he should start focusing on fixing his worthless search engine instead of blaming the employees that he likely underpays. Their piece of shit search makes it impossible to find useful stuff to buy, so I never buy stuff from them.
Work will set you free
Yeah because you'll die chained to your desk and leave a bloated unhappy corpse behind.
You sell furniture that makes Ikea look like luxury goods. You aren't doing anything that's going to change the world for the better. Fuck off.
Yeah they find that balance by being so rich and powerful that they can do whatever they want, or they find that "balance" by ignoring their families and spending little time with them, like Fr who tf thinks Elon Musk is a good dad? The bastard has like ten kids, also he and his buddies are cyber bullying one of his own kids for being trans.
Ambition in general is almost anathema to a "work/life balance" because ambition only drives greed and lust for power, and families are usually just a prop or some other kind of object or resource to these people.
I've spent $1000s on Wayfair.
You just lost a customer Shah. Good luck working hard to find some other rube's money to take, because you won't be getting any more of mine.
It's fun watching these companies die in real time
What a cunt
Work hard so you can make other people rich.
I guess that means we should move our beds into our cubicles and bring in a pickle jar so we have a place to pee. I have to stand in amazement at the blindness of people in management. Do you really think employees want to spend more time in the office with no incentive of any kind, other than you telling them that work and life should blend together more?
It's like when I was in healthcare billing and our boss would say, "OK you did 42 accounts today, tomorrow let's try for 45." And my reaction was always "and why should I when I can barely get 42 done in a day, I'm making a lousy wage, nobody ever acknowledges the work we're already doing, and all the managers keep telling us we're not working hard enough." I mean - wow, could the corporate people be more clueless??
You missed the part where the boss fires those who don't comply.
"Want to" isn't a natural language statement, it's a bullying one as in "You want to do this, or else, RIGHT!?"
True that. I actually walked out of my job when my boss started to get angry over us not doing more than humanly possible. No I do not WANT to do this or else. They don't seem to get why dangling a sword over our heads isn't much of an inspiration to keep going.
Not every boss earns the respect of their employees... in fact most people worthy of respect end up being removed from a managerial role, I've found. Sorta like a good politician - more likely to end up killed than reforming the system.:-(
Douuuuuche bag
Way fairrrr?!
I guarantee he had ChatGPT write this.
This is neither harsh, nor a wakeup call.
It's absolutely a wake up call, it's time for job searching.
Fair enough.