Wayfair CEO sends a harsh wake-up call to employees

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.

doublejay1999,
@doublejay1999@lemmy.world avatar

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.

silverbax,

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.

IchNichtenLichten,
@IchNichtenLichten@lemmy.world avatar

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.

gsfraley,

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.

Bye,

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.

silverbax,

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.

phoneymouse,

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.

Chessmasterrex,

Work hard so you can make other people rich.

LoamImprovement,

…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.”

dogslayeggs,

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.

Very_Bad_Janet,

I guarantee he had ChatGPT write this.

Ghostalmedia,
@Ghostalmedia@lemmy.world avatar

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.

zib,
zib avatar

“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.

magnetosphere,
magnetosphere avatar

He could have made it much shorter: “If you’re not already looking for another job, start NOW.”

partial_accumen,

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.”

jordanlund,
@jordanlund@lemmy.world avatar

What do the Wayfair employees actually do though?

Isn’t it just a front end for drop shipped garbage from China? Like Temu only more expensive?

Probably tech staff running the website and maybe a handful of customer service reps. I can’t imagine they maintain their own inventory or warehouses.

Oh, and the advertising department, but that’s likely outsourced too.

Meltrax,

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.

phoneymouse,

Douuuuuche bag

AbidanYre,

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.

echo64,

It’s fun watching these companies die in real time

garretble,
@garretble@lemmy.world avatar

So don’t buy from Wayfair, got it.

reversebananimals,

I’ve spent $1000s on Wayfair.

You just lost a customer Shah. Good luck working hard to find some other rube’s money to take, because you won’t be getting any more of mine.

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