Interview with Uber's HR chief Liane Hornsey on the firm's efforts to improve its work culture since Susan Fowler's blog post
Wall Street Journal : Tweets: @triketora , @triketora , @ericajoy , @susanthesquark , @wsj , @sw , @lkherman , @sfiegerman , @danprimack , @danprimack , and @demetria_g Tweets: Tracy Chou / @triketora : someone sounds disgruntled about having to do her job http://twitter.com/... Tracy Chou / @triketora : wait what. for real, lady? http://www.wsj.com/... http://twitter.com/... Erica Joy / @ericajoy : Is Hornsey channeling 45 in this response? Cursing, centers her own self sacrifice, & doesn't answer the question. http://www.wsj.com/... http://twitter.com/... Susan J. Fowler / @susanthesquark : She really, really doesn't like me (Fun note: I was actually a bar raiser during my time there!) http://www.wsj.com/... @wsj : Can this executive make Uber a place women want to work? HR chief Liane Hornsey talks about the road ahead http://www.wsj.com/... Susan Wu / @sw : Uber Head of HR demonstrating expert level pettiness. Also, that HR always works for the company first, not for employee well being. http://twitter.com/... Lily Herman / @lkherman : Ah, this one quote from Uber's head of HR makes every other part of this article useless. http://twitter.com/... Seth Fiegerman / @sfiegerman : sounds like Uber's diversity and inclusion efforts are going about as well as you'd expect https://www.wsj.com/... pic.twitter.com/XidxBfs0hw Dan Primack / @danprimack : 2/ just to be clear. She says they're trying to do em all, but implies some are just unworkable to do in whole. Dan Primack / @danprimack : WSJ intrvw w/ Uber HR head is pretty remarkable, if only for all the Holder recommends she admits Uber isn't doing http://www.wsj.com/... Demetria Gallegos / @demetria_g : @Uber HR chief Liane Hornsey: ‘I sat up until 4 a.m. every bloody morning answering thousands of bloody emails.’ http://on.wsj.com/2z9ymYd
Context & Ripple Effects
Uber's culture overhaul has been running through a defined sequence since Susan Fowler's blog post: the Covington & Burling report recommended a board oversight committee and reworked values, and harassment findings led to more than 20 firings after 215 claims were investigated. A month later, BuzzFeed interviews with over two dozen employees described how the hard-charging culture left staff drained.
This WSJ interview with HR chief Liane Hornsey was meant to show that work mid-stream — but the reaction visible in the description shows Fowler herself, plus Tracy Chou and Erica Joy, publicly disputing her answers on Twitter within hours. The people whose allegations forced the reform are now grading the reformer in real time.
First-order effects
- Hornsey's interview becomes a credibility problem for Uber's HR function itself: the immediate effect is not what she said but that Fowler, Chou, and Erica Joy's public rebuttals frame the company's culture messaging as evasive before it can land.
Second-order effects
- The backlash raises the bar for CEO-level follow-through — pressure mounts on Travis Kalanick, already damaged by the dashcam lecture to a driver, to make the culture commitment concrete rather than delegate it to HR, which is the gap the November 'cultural norms' announcement later fills.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, tech-company culture reform gets adjudicated publicly by the employees who filed the original complaints, making HR communications a governance risk that boards — per the Holder-era oversight recommendations — can no longer leave to the communications team.
The trend: Workplace-culture repair at high-profile tech companies is shifting from internal HR programs to public accountability contests, where the credibility of the response matters as much as the reforms themselves.