The rise and fall of Uber's chief of human resources, Liane Hornsey

In January, I met with Liana Hornsey, who until yesterday was Chief Human Resources Officer of Uber, to discuss the progress she had made in helping to reform the culture of Uber. The company had asked me to report on its recovery, in anticipation of the release of its redesigned driver application. But I was interested in something else: how were things at Uber since the arrival of CEO Dara Khosrowshahi?

She told me that she had asked an employee – a three-year veteran at Uber – how he felt there. She said, "We used to think we were good people doing good things," said Hornsey. "" Now we feel we are bad people who make bad things. "" She tried to repair that feeling. "

Hornsey had arrived at Uber just a few weeks before Susan Fowler published the February 2017 ticket that propelled the company's turmoil, he still works to recover She showed up to the staff at the meeting of all the tears after this post.While during her tenure, she oversaw numerous investigations, led Holder's report, sailed through dozens of departures, served on the Interim management team of 14 people who ran the business after the ouster of Travis Kalanick, and tried to save Uber.

Last night, eighteen months later, Hornsey resigned.

His email to employees, sent yesterday, provides no details on the reason for his departure, nor the Khosrowshahi e-mail sent to the staff. But this comes hours after Reuters reported that an anonymous group of Uber employees complained that it routinely rejected complaints of racial discrimination. Regardless of the content of these claims, the complaint process and the subsequent departure of Hornsey are a mark of what Hornsey has helped to create during his time in the company – a system that empowers authorized employees. call the executives for bad behavior and require prompt action.

The resignation of Hornsey is also a sign of what has not yet been achieved. Discontented employees still do not trust Uber systems, and they turn to the media to voice their grievances. This suggests that Khosrowshahi's attempt to establish trust among the employees, an assurance that the company can address challenges internally, has not taken root.

"We do the right thing, period," Khosrowshahi often repeats as a mantra. And when it comes to business optics, there is a prescribed list of good things. When there is a scandal for example, someone has to leave. But the good things, the things that honor people, move a business forward and begin to heal a fractured culture are not always so clear. Regardless of the events that caused it, the departure of Hornsey is a crisis for the company – a crisis that Hornsey is no longer managing.

To be clear, the details of what happened at Uber have not yet been unveiled. According to Reuters, an anonymous group of employees, identifying themselves as people of color, said that Hornsey made disparaging remarks about the global head of diversity and the inclusion of the company. company, hired in January, Bernard Coleman, and denigrated and threatened Bozoma Saint John last month.

Reuters reports that this conflict was the reason why Saint John recently left his position as Brand Manager at Uber to hold a position as Marketing Director of the talented Endeavor Agency. In addition, Reuters reviewed an email in which investigators from law firm Gibson Dunn told the group of employees making the complaint that some of their allegations had been substantiated.

One thing is clear: the next person to hold the position of HR chief at Uber will inherit a very different culture, thanks to the structures built by Hornsey. She arrived at an organization in crisis, and that had reached a huge size without having the human resources that one could expect from a company the size of Uber. The Herculean task of developing a set of systems and practices for managing the organization was his responsibility.

She did nothing more than what the industry peers were already doing. It's a company that's boasted in January of newly-established volunteer days, allowing employees to serve soup in a homeless shelter or play with hospitalized children, as if that's the case. 39, was something unique. Since Uber had never paid employees for volunteer time or had shown any philanthropic commitment, it was remarkable. Compared to other companies of its size and scale, it was remarkable that the program did not exist before.

But most of Hornsey's work involved the construction of common business processes, such as less biased performance evaluations or management training programs. Once she saw the company go through its initial crisis, facilitate investigations, respond directly to hundreds of emails and perform some 200 "listening sessions", Hornsey instituted this approach: pay equity for all employees, regardless of race or gender. "Very few executives want to go to this place in any company, there is still resistance," she said in January, it was before Khosrowshahi starts, and she had to sell the idea to all 14 other members of the management team.The biggest challenge with pay equity comes long after it was instituted, of course, When Directors Need to Negotiate Salaries for New Employees

Despite this transparency, Uber still has the flair to refuse to publish the full report commissioned by Fowler .. Compiled by former district attorney Eric Holder, he resulted in 47 recommendations that were made public in June. (A second law firm was hired specifically to investigate sexual harassment after the company received 215 complaints as a result of the rating of Fowler.) To this day, Holder's report has not been published I asked Hornsey why, given the utmost importance given to transparency, the company would not publish it. "It's entirely a decision of the board of directors," she said. "Honestly, I read it, I do not know why you would not let go of it."

Transparency alone, the one that could have come from the publication of this report, does not solve a problem in the world. As author Rachel Botsman, author of "Who Can You Trust," says, transparency occurs once trust is broken.What matters is not that you reveal everything but that people believe that you are honest with them, and that they can, in turn, be honest with you.

Finally, that is why Hornsey had to resign, regardless of what happens the current investigation.Hosrowshahi needs a strong and experienced HR management, but he still needs the trust of his employees.At the moment, dealing with the small information published publicly and at the allusions of a worrying survey, departure is what it means to do the right thing-per- iodine

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