The sound of Uber’s fall from glory resonated louder with each negative headline that plagued the company for months.  Uber’s struggle through damaging scandals have played out in blaring viral media taglines, such that many experts were not shy to proclaim the company’s severe public relations problems.   While it’s clear Uber has more than its fair share of problems, they are not, first and foremost, public relations problems.  Many critics brought up the company’s negative influence on ridership in public transportation and the declining revenue it produced for cities.

Uber passengers and public transportation users alike fond themselves stuck in heavy traffic for prolonged periods of time because of what’s been called

“UBER CONGESTION”

(Hill, 2018).  The ulitmately operational scandals resulted in replacement of Uber’s co-founder Travis Kalanick as chief executive in August of 2017 with Dara Khosrowshahi who previously headed Expedia group.  He had a tall order in hands: to fix a business model that harms drivers and the environment, and drains away passengers and revenue from public transportation.

To address the company’s far-reaching and fundamental culture problems, Uber announced a pilot of a corporate education program — a rare move for a company in crisis (Carson, 2018).  This rapid and urgent change to avoid business failure is a reactive method implemented in tuning point situations (Moran, et al., 2011).  There was really no other way to save Uber but rather to pivot and focus the public eye on positive changes, learning, and growth.   As opposed to anticipatory change, when a company is aware that their current strategies are still producing, but on the slowdown, and can slowly implement new game plans, Uber was ripe for immediate action.

CHANGE

During the first phase of discovery, it has been found that Uber’s senior executives weren’t working as a team and only had one-on-one relationships with the previous CEO-Kalanick who was in charge of them all.  Further down, the 3,000 managers at Uber were untrained and new in managing others.  Finally, the 15,000 employees of Uber didn’t have a common sense and understanding of the business’s strategy — a hazardously unorthodox strategy for an organization that was known for empowering an individual’s ideas (Carson, 2018).

The focus of the new plan of action for changing the corporate culture must have been planned to start from the top and to trickle down the organizational backbone.  The executive team needed to work together in the interim absence of the CEO and after the new leadership joined the company, the focus shifted to managers and all the employees that needed to operate on the same wavelength when it came to strategic thinking.

However, when an organization integrates employees from different national cultures, the challenges are more significant and for the shift to occur, the skills required for success need to be broader, deeper and more sophisticated (Moran, et al., 2011).  Uniting managers and employees from globally integrated organizations can produce higher resistance to change.

Ann Marie Malecha of Dezenhall Resources, a crisis management and public affairs firm, suggests that for Uber to be able to recover from this very publig fall from grace, several steps need to occur (2017).  A steady and strategic communication that would likely require an influx of money and some time would be essential to Stop the Bleeding. Furthermore, upon facing the recovery from damaged reputation, Malecha (2017) suggests that it is time to take hard look at what caused the breakdown.  It is time to Roll up the Sleeves refresh the learning mode and implement new policies, workforce changes, as well as new leadership to combat a corporate culture of impropriety and misconduct.  In the end only the hard work, investment in change and education, and leadership commitment would result in a change to the organizational culture and Back to Business style focus on winning.

While the typical method for implementing organizational change that involve unfreezing, change and refreezing steps over time is usually preferred, it may often happen that global companies have too much on the line and cricises at hand to be able to manage shifts with more analytical aproach of planned change.  Social learning however may be a good start to unite the multiple levels of employees of the company and the change must start at the top.

References

Carson, B. (2018, February 8). Inside Uber’s effort to fix its culture through a Harvard-inspired ‘university.’          Forbes. Retrieved from: https://www.forbes.com/sites/bizcarson/2018/02/03/inside-ubers-effort-to-fix-its-culture-through-a-harvard-inspired-university/#1cc586291695

Hill, S. (2018, March 26). New leadership has not changed Uber. The New York Times. Retrieved from: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/26/opinion/leadership-uber-business-model.html

Malecha, A. M. (2017, June 20). Will a leadership shake-up drive operational change at uber? Forbes. Retrieved from: https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesagencycouncil/2017/06/20/will-a-leadership-shake-up-drive-operational-change-at-uber/#a50687130e59

Moran, R. T., Abrmson, N., Moran, S. V. (2011). Global Leaders Learning from Others and Change. In Managing Cultural Differences (pp. 101-139). New York: Routledge