Staff Reports
This managerial approach is offered by The Washington Post as news, and it appears to be nowadays. Elon Musk has chosen to let the remaining half further reduce his payroll after sending half of it out the door. Employees of Twitter had to sign a promise to actually work for them in the upcoming "extremely hard-core Twitter" future if they wanted to keep their high salaries.
Welcome to modern-day corporate America. Not just corporate America, but also any time before the pandemic. At order to keep my job at every job I've ever had, I was expected to work "high intensity" in the office or elsewhere. You'll be ready to make a life anyplace once you've worked at a pizza shop run by a Brooklyn transplant in a Los Angeles suburb where shouting expletives at a volume close to jet engine levels was the norm for communication. (And let me add that the owner was in a nice mood at the time. When he talked gently, we had to be quite concerned.) Even if we goldbricked occasionally as teenagers, I guess we were expected to cook "extremely hardcore pizza."
Adulthood brought only worsening, particularly in salaried corporate roles. Who among us who holds such a position hasn't worked an average of 50 hours a week to stay competitive and produce results? Nowadays, the majority of adults still have to work in an office for a minimum of 40 hours every week. And very few of us receive catered meals, depressing rooms, etc. Musk's statement that "only exceptional performance will constitute a passing grade" is a tired platitude that has been used in every round of performance reviews since the 1980s. There are probably more Dilbert panels on that by Scott Adams.
So in essence, all Musk wants to do is force Twitter to adhere to standard corporate America labour standards, which is only noteworthy since Twitter was a bloated exception to the norm. Twitter had become so bloated from a lack of a clear direct opponent that its previous owners were happy to sell their stock when Musk made a bid for it. Profitability was the same issue they faced as Musk, but without the intense strain of the leverage Musk employed to acquire it. In any case, Twitter's golden era was quickly coming to an end; the previous management only narrowly avoided being forced to restructure by leaving.
More attrition will be the immediate impact of this requirement, especially in those areas where commitment to profitability is least strong. According to Musk, those will be treated as layoffs in order to comply with federal and state labour rules. He will provide employees a three-month severance package. Since Musk sees Twitter as primarily an engineering company, he doesn't seem overly concerned with brain drains.
Pushing for considerably more attrition also makes sense if that's the approach Musk intends to follow. Musk wants the low-motivation brigades to self-identify this time in order to remove more of the "deadwood," as he sees it, rather than merely cutting for the sake of chopping as he initially did. The risks of this strategy include the fact that the deadwood typically remains after the more marketable individuals have left. However, the tech sector is now losing a lot of employment and may be about to have a bubble burst, so the marketable Twitter employees may not currently have many options.
The astonishing thing is how little of an impact Twitter's loss of half its workforce has had on the product, which supports Musk's actions. Conservatives dislike moderate regimes, but they haven't truly faltered yet either. In particular, when they work 40 hours a week in the office instead of 10-15 hours a week, everywhere, it requires a lot less people to run this platform successfully. Alternatively, it can run on autopilot for a very long period before failing. Musk's need for cost-control has already made it clear, and he is undoubtedly learning from it how important coders are—and how few there are in most other parts of the business.
Will Musk be successful in introducing this kind of a "hardcore" Twitter 2.0? It's difficult to say, but it will be fascinating to see the process and the outcomes.
The preceding is a summary of an article that originally appeared on Hot Air.
