Shortly after Jeff Jones quit as President of the company; UBER details early steps to change culture, and ongoing COO search

Uber held a special press call, hosted by board member Arianna Huffington and staffed with three of its highest ranking female staff, including North American operations lead Rachel Holt, Chief HR officer Liane Hornsey and company comms lead Rachel Whetstone. The call was pretty clearly an attempt to counter-message some of the negative press Uber has faced, specifically around its culture and accusations of sexism.

Responding to a reported question that implied Uber had intentionally stacked the call with female employees for the sake of optics, Huffington responded that she believed it was actually very “exciting” to have so many women on the call. “It’s not like we called them from central casting,” she added, noting that Holt, Hornsey and Whetstone really do run significant aspects of the day-to-day business at the ride-hailing company..
The focus of Hornsey and her department, then, is on putting the right organizational design in place to support the “best culture,” she said. To that end, the company has conducted “over 100 listening sessions” to date, and has established nine separate areas of focus to work on in pursuit of overall improvement. A key part of this effort is a renewed focus on “diversity and inclusion,” Hornsey said.
Uber will release its first diversity and inclusion report by the end of March, in accordance with that goal. It has also updated 1,500 job descriptions to “ensure they’re free from bias and discrimination,” Hornsey added, and it’s working with employees to revamp its performance management system, which it has found to be “unfair and inequitable” through talks with staff. It will also begin rolling out training to “educate and inform employees” on a range of subjects, including “why diversity matters.”
Holt addressed Uber’s current state of business, detailing how the company has actually continued to see strong growth and gains despite the torrent of negative publicity its received. She acknowledged that the company needs to repair its relationships with drivers, including providing them with more input when it comes to setting fares.
Uber also addressed the issue of whether it ever considered Kalanick leaving the CEO role as a response to its ongoing problems, which include an outburst by him to a driver caught on tape via dashcam. Huffington dismissed discussion of any such hypotheticals by the board, and lauded Kalanick’s role in creating the ride-hailing industry as well as Uber as its primary success story.