This is not the Holder (well, Covington would be more accurate) Report. The Introduction to this document makes reference to report Covington prepared for and presented to the Special Committee of Uber's board, and to the fact that the full board adopted all of the recommendations in that report.
Beyond the Introduction, this seems to just be the recommendations from the Covington report; the full report (per the Introduction ) was to cover “(1) Uber’s workplace
environment as it related to the allegations of discrimination, harassment, and retaliation in
Ms. Fowler’s post; (2) whether the company’s policies and practices were sufficient to prevent and
properly address discrimination, harassment, and retaliation in the workplace; and (3) what steps
Uber could take to ensure that its commitment to a diverse and inclusive workplace was reflected
not only in the company’s policies but made real in the experiences of each of Uber’s employees.”
This document only includes the part addressing (3), which implicitly indicates that the bottom line conclusion on (2) was “no”, but doesn't really provide any clear information on (1).
Every new grad: read this. Then file it away and review it as soon as you have people reporting to you. This should be required reading for every start-up founder and every manager at every mid-size and large org, and every person who criticizes the decisions of those people or hopes to be in those positions. Which means every creative, every knowledge worker, engineer, designer, lawyer, physician, all of them. And therefore, almost without exception, everyone reading this comment.
Edit: This is the executive symmary. It contains a lot of what to do. Going forward, you don't need to know so much how Uber got into the mess they're in. You need to know how to stay out of similar messes. This is a good plan for how to stay out of such messes.
It's also interesting for those looking for startup ideas. The procedures and practices recommended here are ways to reduce institutional maladies based mostly on human activity, but it's probable that many of them could be be achieved, or augmented, through technological solutions.
Think about it: If you can build an innovative piece of tech that genuinely helps implement these policies, or achieve the same outcome in a different way, then you've got a huge market of large, rich organisations who'll be interested. Worth considering.
Yeah, this is some free management consulting. While it's tailored to a very specific problem at Uber, it's still a set of good best practices to consider.
The meat of the document is missing. It states the situation that triggered the investigation, describes the process followed, and gives the recommendations.
But it doesn't tell us what they learned through the process.
While there are some concrete next steps in here (hire a COO, management training, HR training, the "Rooney Rule"), what is the goal and how do these steps connect to it? As far as the harassment stuff, I think the solution is clear: have a zero tolerance policy and enforce it. But it otherwise says the words "inclusion" and "diversity" a lot, but never really connects those words to achievable outcomes and seems superficial. Maybe the end result is to restore Uber's image - in which case doing those things makes sense - but without any goal posts or authority, many of these recommendations seem to fall short.
I am repulsed by Uber's culture (and have stopped using them since the Susan Fowler story), but I don't think "zero tolerance" is the answer. "Zero tolerance" is basically committing to overreacting. It leads to absurd outcomes like students being suspending for having "weapons" like nail clippers and rubber bands, or "drugs" like cough drops or mouthwash: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_tolerance_(schools)#Criti...
Just because Uber is under-reacting now doesn't mean that "zero tolerance" is the answer. Incidents should be dealt with in a proportionate way.
There was an engineer (I think she was the woman at Google who started the spreadsheet about comparing salaries, but not sure) who said something along the lines of "If you have a 'Chief Diversity Officer', you're doing it wrong." Basically the argument was that it's should be everyone's responsibility, from CEO on down, to ensure that you're recruiting people from varied backgrounds, and that everyone is treated with respect. A Chief Diversity Officer basically seems more like a PR job than something that will actually change internal culture.
Now, granted, Uber obviously was failing on their own in terms of having a respectful culture, so not sure what else to recommend, but I agree, the recommendations in this report seem a lot more to do with optics than anything else.
I've got to agree with you. The whole thing is vague, boilerplate corporate speak. Half of it could've been copied-and-pasted from any large company's press release about their new diversity initiative.
You can't enforce zero tolerance without good policies and accountability, which appears to have been sorely lacking. See recommendations III.C, HR Record Keeping; III.D, Track Agreements with Employees; IV.B, Mandatory HR Training; and all of section VI (especially "An Owner of Resources-Related Policies Should Be Identified or Hired").
The goal the recommendations address is stated in the Introduction: “to ensure that its commitment to a diverse and inclusive workplace was reflected not only in the company’s policies but made real in the experiences of each of Uber’s employees.”
D&I is trendy in the bay area these days. For diversity, the recommendation is to provide a monetary incentive with regards to diversity metrics, i.e. use discrimination in an effort to have a more diverse employee pool. Why this is seen as okay is beyond me.
My eyes are bleeding from all the bureaucratic jargon. "Special Committee", "Oversight Committee", "Independent Committee" for the promotions process, checklists for alcohol consumption, human resources training, etc. I dearly hope it doesn't take this many layers of control within a company to ensure a livable atmosphere for its employees.
According to Wikipedia, Uber has about 12,000 employees. Especially given how bad things apparently got, it seems reasonable to require a few layers of oversight to achieve lasting positive change.
You're just demonstrating the same facile mindset that plagues experts of every discipline, so convinced that the problems of every other field -- of which they are largely ignorant -- are obviously trivial, and could be solved with a bit of common sense.
Consider the difficulty most people on this site will have encountered just getting a handful of software components to cooperate successfully. Now imagine trying to do the same with an organisation of thousands of human beings.
Left to their own devices, large groups of human beings easily fall into horrendous anti-patterns. Avoiding or fixing these anti-patterns is not just hard, it is probably the hardest problem human beings have ever faced, given that we have been working on it for the duration of our existence, and we're still mostly terrible at it. This is not trivial, it is mindbendingly difficult.
The "bureaucratic jargon" you mention is just the specialist language that the field of management of human resources has created to talk about the problems they're trying to solve, and the structures they've designed to solve them. And really, it's hardly impenetrable in comparison with even a mildly technical blog post.
When you dismiss problems like this as easily solvable, or the recommendations of experts as bureaucratic jargon, then you're the pointy-haired boss waving away technical arguments why something is infeasible. You're the politician saying ISPs need to put more filters on the tubes to censor the internet. You're the cable host smugly dismissing climatology as fake news.
"Uber should consider moving the catered dinner it offers to a time when this benefit can be utilized by a broader group of employees, including employees who have spouses or families waiting for them at home, and that signals an earlier end to the work day."
Note to Linux users: this PDF looks terrible without msttcorefonts installed. I guess MS Word neglects to embed fonts? Also, as someone who is not used to seeing documents generated by MS Word, I'm surprised at how bad the typography is in general (although maybe this due to user error...for example it looks like hyphenation might be disabled.)
Feels like Uber just paid a load of money to get patronized by a well-respected official. Nothing(as far as this public version suggests) in this document should be surprising to a growing company. "You mean if we create a patriarchal company culture that preys on personal weaknesses and demeans women and minorities we're going to have a bad public image? Gee, who would've thought!"
Unfortunate as it may be, sometimes in large corporations, it takes paying an outsider to identify and document something, before anything will be done about it.
While some of the points in the report are legit, I feel most of the content is so general that you could literally change the title of the company to any other tech firms and it will probably still work.
I genuinely believe that people work hard because they believe what they do has a meaning, not because the company serves free dinner/beer/water at 7pm or 8:15pm. I don't understand why you should run a fast-paced startup like a non-profit. As someone who used to work in law firms, not only we don't have catered anything, we regularly stay till after 10pm and on-call during weekends/holidays so we make barely the same, if no less, than a first-year engineer. And you let a law firm make "better workplace culture" recommendations. I am so lost.
I'm willing to believe that at a certain point in a startup's life cycle, it is reasonable to expect the early employees to work non-stop. It's also reasonable to sell your product early on at a loss, to garner interest. But at a certain point, if your customers are not willing to pay enough for your product to cover the costs, you've got a problem. Likewise, if your business only works if your employees are working 80+ hours a week, you have to ask yourself if you really have a viable business.
I think this point comes a lot earlier than most people are willing to admit. If your startup needs 10 people to get off the ground and you can only afford 5 who work 'round the clock, that's one thing; if your startup needs 20,000 people and you have 10,000 working 24/7/365, that's another.
I will also concede there are jobs worth devoting every waking moment to, because they are worth doing, because they satisfy you intellectually or emotionally, because they save lives, because you will benefit greatly, personally from the work, materially or in reputation. But a lot of tech and other professional jobs are a lot more predatory than that. You take a lot of young people straight from one environment which lionizes the all-nighter and accomplishing arbitrary assigned goals (college), drag them to a new place where they don't have friends, family, or anything else which either makes demands on their time or gives them meaning and validation, and then encourage them to work non-stop on projects with no clear moral pay-off and a financial payoff that accrues to other people.
Agreed. These could be the speaker notes for the mandatory "don't be an asshat" training I've taken at three or four different workplaces. Doesn't mean anything in it is wrong.
It's missing the obvious "theory of operation" part though, which could be stated as "don't be an asshat" or "behave like you have to explain your behavior to your mother when she's on her deathbed," or maybe even "what if your sweetheart's sister worked here?"
> I feel most of the content is so general that you could literally change the title of the company to any other tech firms and it will probably still work.
Keep reading. The start of the report is pretty generic, but it gets very specific and pointed around page 10 ("Changes in Employee Policies and Practices").
This smells a lot like a pentesting report: pay people a lot of money to make a report, persevere with current bad practices, then when litigation comes up say "Hey, we took this seriously. Look at all the money we spent on this report!"
Idk, a lot of heads rolled, including the supposed right hand man of the CEO that was supposedly behind some egregious things. What more can we say should have been done without seeing the information behind the report?
While some of the points in the report are legit, I feel most of the content is so general that you could literally change the title of the company to any other tech firms and it will probably still work.
I don't understand why you should run a fast-paced startup as a non-profit. As someone who used to work in law firms, not only we don't have catered dinner, we regularly stay till after 10pm and on-call during the weekends/holidays so we make barely the same, if no less, than a first-year engineer. And you let a law firm make "better workplace culture" recommendations. I am so lost.
Well, for one, Google does offer the catered dinners. If Uber didn't, then the engineers either wouldn't stay late (ideally; workaholism is bad), or they'd go somewhere that does offer that kind of thing.
> Uber should establish key metrics to which its leaders will be held accountable in the performance review process. This would include, for example, metrics that are tied to improving diversity, responsiveness to employee complaints, employee satisfaction, and compliance.
Every metric has the power for evil. This will be gamed, simply by measuring these things behaviour will be affected in unpredictable ways. I understand the challenge they're up against but I absolutely cringe at turning some of these subjective items into metrics.
Don't think for a second that these are isolated incidents. These things happen all the time, it just so happened that people like Susan Fowler fought back. I've seen these things happen constantly.
I'm mostly unimpressed. Most of the suggestions are just process changes, which often just obfuscate organizational issues and cripple performance. The only value is the signal it sends to employees that affect the culture negatively.
The most substantive recommendation, IMO, is that they suggest a COO that controls most of the day-to-day. It's a clear move to reduce the CEO's power, and most likely a path to remove the CEO in the future unless the CEO regains power, which is unlikely.
[+] [-] dragonwriter|8 years ago|reply
Beyond the Introduction, this seems to just be the recommendations from the Covington report; the full report (per the Introduction ) was to cover “(1) Uber’s workplace environment as it related to the allegations of discrimination, harassment, and retaliation in Ms. Fowler’s post; (2) whether the company’s policies and practices were sufficient to prevent and properly address discrimination, harassment, and retaliation in the workplace; and (3) what steps Uber could take to ensure that its commitment to a diverse and inclusive workplace was reflected not only in the company’s policies but made real in the experiences of each of Uber’s employees.”
This document only includes the part addressing (3), which implicitly indicates that the bottom line conclusion on (2) was “no”, but doesn't really provide any clear information on (1).
[+] [-] killjoywashere|8 years ago|reply
Edit: This is the executive symmary. It contains a lot of what to do. Going forward, you don't need to know so much how Uber got into the mess they're in. You need to know how to stay out of similar messes. This is a good plan for how to stay out of such messes.
[+] [-] stupidcar|8 years ago|reply
Think about it: If you can build an innovative piece of tech that genuinely helps implement these policies, or achieve the same outcome in a different way, then you've got a huge market of large, rich organisations who'll be interested. Worth considering.
[+] [-] bduerst|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ww520|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] djsumdog|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paulsutter|8 years ago|reply
But it doesn't tell us what they learned through the process.
[+] [-] SilasX|8 years ago|reply
1) They should lie about "oh it was this guys first offense".
2) A bad performance review for reporting someone's sexual advances "isn't retaliation because we said you could transfer".
3) It's better to just buy jackets for the men than to buy no jackets or to pay more for the women's.
I mean, you can kind of loosely guess at it from the recommendations, but nothing direct.
[+] [-] austenallred|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] um_ya|8 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] terryjsmith|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] haberman|8 years ago|reply
Just because Uber is under-reacting now doesn't mean that "zero tolerance" is the answer. Incidents should be dealt with in a proportionate way.
[+] [-] hn_throwaway_99|8 years ago|reply
Now, granted, Uber obviously was failing on their own in terms of having a respectful culture, so not sure what else to recommend, but I agree, the recommendations in this report seem a lot more to do with optics than anything else.
[+] [-] briholt|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jillsy|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dragonwriter|8 years ago|reply
The goal the recommendations address is stated in the Introduction: “to ensure that its commitment to a diverse and inclusive workplace was reflected not only in the company’s policies but made real in the experiences of each of Uber’s employees.”
[+] [-] cyclist222|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TheCoelacanth|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xapata|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] wonder_bread|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blatherard|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stupidcar|8 years ago|reply
This XKCD cartoon, basically: https://xkcd.com/1831/
Consider the difficulty most people on this site will have encountered just getting a handful of software components to cooperate successfully. Now imagine trying to do the same with an organisation of thousands of human beings.
Left to their own devices, large groups of human beings easily fall into horrendous anti-patterns. Avoiding or fixing these anti-patterns is not just hard, it is probably the hardest problem human beings have ever faced, given that we have been working on it for the duration of our existence, and we're still mostly terrible at it. This is not trivial, it is mindbendingly difficult.
The "bureaucratic jargon" you mention is just the specialist language that the field of management of human resources has created to talk about the problems they're trying to solve, and the structures they've designed to solve them. And really, it's hardly impenetrable in comparison with even a mildly technical blog post.
When you dismiss problems like this as easily solvable, or the recommendations of experts as bureaucratic jargon, then you're the pointy-haired boss waving away technical arguments why something is infeasible. You're the politician saying ISPs need to put more filters on the tubes to censor the internet. You're the cable host smugly dismissing climatology as fake news.
[+] [-] vkou|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cozzyd|8 years ago|reply
"Uber should consider moving the catered dinner it offers to a time when this benefit can be utilized by a broader group of employees, including employees who have spouses or families waiting for them at home, and that signals an earlier end to the work day."
Note to Linux users: this PDF looks terrible without msttcorefonts installed. I guess MS Word neglects to embed fonts? Also, as someone who is not used to seeing documents generated by MS Word, I'm surprised at how bad the typography is in general (although maybe this due to user error...for example it looks like hyphenation might be disabled.)
[+] [-] aemachado94|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] davidbrent|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joshualross|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] an27|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sjbase|8 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] mandevil|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] boxcardavin|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] favorited|8 years ago|reply
Huffington: There’s a lot of data that shows when there’s one woman on the board, it’s much more likely that there will be a second woman on the board
Bonderman: Actually what it shows is it’s much likely to be more talking
What a garbage fire.
[1]https://finance.yahoo.com/news/inside-ubers-hands-meeting-tr...
[+] [-] sywan|8 years ago|reply
I genuinely believe that people work hard because they believe what they do has a meaning, not because the company serves free dinner/beer/water at 7pm or 8:15pm. I don't understand why you should run a fast-paced startup like a non-profit. As someone who used to work in law firms, not only we don't have catered anything, we regularly stay till after 10pm and on-call during weekends/holidays so we make barely the same, if no less, than a first-year engineer. And you let a law firm make "better workplace culture" recommendations. I am so lost.
[+] [-] saalweachter|8 years ago|reply
I think this point comes a lot earlier than most people are willing to admit. If your startup needs 10 people to get off the ground and you can only afford 5 who work 'round the clock, that's one thing; if your startup needs 20,000 people and you have 10,000 working 24/7/365, that's another.
I will also concede there are jobs worth devoting every waking moment to, because they are worth doing, because they satisfy you intellectually or emotionally, because they save lives, because you will benefit greatly, personally from the work, materially or in reputation. But a lot of tech and other professional jobs are a lot more predatory than that. You take a lot of young people straight from one environment which lionizes the all-nighter and accomplishing arbitrary assigned goals (college), drag them to a new place where they don't have friends, family, or anything else which either makes demands on their time or gives them meaning and validation, and then encourage them to work non-stop on projects with no clear moral pay-off and a financial payoff that accrues to other people.
[+] [-] OliverJones|8 years ago|reply
It's missing the obvious "theory of operation" part though, which could be stated as "don't be an asshat" or "behave like you have to explain your behavior to your mother when she's on her deathbed," or maybe even "what if your sweetheart's sister worked here?"
[+] [-] duskwuff|8 years ago|reply
Keep reading. The start of the report is pretty generic, but it gets very specific and pointed around page 10 ("Changes in Employee Policies and Practices").
[+] [-] jstewartmobile|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fullshark|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sywan|8 years ago|reply
I don't understand why you should run a fast-paced startup as a non-profit. As someone who used to work in law firms, not only we don't have catered dinner, we regularly stay till after 10pm and on-call during the weekends/holidays so we make barely the same, if no less, than a first-year engineer. And you let a law firm make "better workplace culture" recommendations. I am so lost.
[+] [-] s73ver|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tmh79|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ryanmarsh|8 years ago|reply
Every metric has the power for evil. This will be gamed, simply by measuring these things behaviour will be affected in unpredictable ways. I understand the challenge they're up against but I absolutely cringe at turning some of these subjective items into metrics.
[+] [-] jonstewart|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Cyclone_|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] netvarun|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] khazhoux|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jmccaf|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] misterbowfinger|8 years ago|reply
The most substantive recommendation, IMO, is that they suggest a COO that controls most of the day-to-day. It's a clear move to reduce the CEO's power, and most likely a path to remove the CEO in the future unless the CEO regains power, which is unlikely.