How to Get and Keep Talent in the Midst of the Many Workplace Crisis

In a world that’s crying out for heroes and feel-good stories, it’s little wonder someone like Elon Musk is capturing the imagination of so many and I was indeed expecting yesterday’s article to be unsavoury to them. What I didn’t expect was for their objection not to be encompassed in a defence of Elon but in them pointing out that there’s a sense of doom and gloom in the tech industry, in general, as more and more layoffs are announced.

While they are correct and a lot of people have been cut from most Silicon Valley darlings and many more may be laid off still before mid-next year, the fundamental difference between those cuts and Elon’s PR disaster is the way they went about it. I never contended that it was a mistake to let people go, -in fact, in my opinion, most enterprises are unimaginably bloated and of gargantuan size for no good reason and everyone could easily get by with half of their workforce everywhere-, I simply said, and I will repeat it, that it was neither humane nor intelligent business-wise to publicly disrespect people and traumatise them when there were ways to avoid it.

In this video, we go over that again but we also discuss the relationship between internal culture and a feeling of safety as well as how mobility in the tech industry affects us overall

This tweet from Jack seems to corroborate what we were saying yesterday and the fact that Twitter had a decent and strong internal culture hasn’t mattered when the speed of growth and the eventual sale came about. This means that we will never be able to feel safe and protected by good culture before we can be sure everyone else externally also shares and adheres to the same moral imperatives.

Here’s the thing - many more layoffs are to come as most giants see their models turn to the need to show profitability over network effects and growth and much mobility is to follow as many of the tech companies are left having to hunt for the next best thing or reinvent themselves in light of the economy and the new height of consumer expectations so what will make the difference between companies will be how they show up during these times of unrest.