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.
He laid off 900 people last year as the company lost nearly 400 million dollars, selling cheap shit Chinese furniture.
Safe to say, he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
Despite what Wall Street thinks, layoffs are almost always the sign of a poorly run company, especially when they do it multiple years in a row, and really especially when they do it during good economic years.
Data from the last 40 years, when layoffs started becoming commonplace, show that companies who lay off in multiple years, especially at the end of the year, see two things happen: their stock price goes up, and they are out of business within 10 years after starting the practice.
These numbers are just averages, but play the odds if you invest in stocks: don’t buy stocks of companies that lay people off, just as you wouldn’t bet on an NFL team that fires its coach every other year.
sign of a poorly run company
I agree but can also be a sign of vulture capitalists stripping value out of a company to line their own pockets before the whole thing goes belly up.
Yup, this isn’t exactly a secret. Killing the golden goose is regular practice for investment firms, regardless of what the press releases say about the changes being implemented being good business sense. It’s simply more lucrative than thoughtful and deliberate investment.
They don’t care about 10 years. They care about next year, and that’s it. It isn’t poor management, it’s management for a different set of goals.
If that were true, they would have had a better fiscal year in 2023. 2024 won’t be any better, because their management is not adapting, they are blaming others for their failures.
The shit they sell is available everywhere too. You can go on Home Depot and Target websites and find the same garbage furniture. It’s also not easy to put together and requires tools not provided in the box. At least IKEA tries to be sustainable and their furniture is easy to assemble.
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.
“There is not a lot of history of laziness being rewarded with success. Hard work is an essential ingredient in any recipe for success.”
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?
It will.
So his employees can bring their kids to work, right ?
So don’t buy from Wayfair, got it.
pushing for staff to put in more overtime
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
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.”
“Working long hours, being responsive, blending work and life, is not anything to shy away from,” he wrote in the email.
“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.
Work will set you free
Yeah because you’ll die chained to your desk and leave a bloated unhappy corpse behind.
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.
…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.”
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.
