Hiring And Firing, How Not To Do It
5 in 5 - Brave & Heart HeartBeat #130 ❤️
There’s a lot going on in the Tech world this week, with most of the biggest headlines dipping over into HR territory, and some marketing to boot, the classic B&H trifecta you could say.
We’re looking at Tik Tok’s chokehold on the music industry, the madness emanating from Twitter HQ (if you listen carefully, you can almost hear it in the distance) and why Slack trash talking isn’t that big a deal.
Let’s get into it.
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#1 - Does Tik Tok Control Music Now?
Anyone who’s been anywhere near Tik Tok or Instagram lately will have heard a snippet from Taylor Swift or Carly Rae Jepson’s new album.
Both have been “lucky” enough to have samples from their songs go viral as sounds on the app, in this case with users parodying the lyrics to funny situations acted out on video clips.
It also happened to Abba, when their song “Angeleyes” became the go-to music to overlay over a video of something you miss, or the song “Wings” by Birdy which is used for videos usually reminiscing over cute moments when people’s kids were little. In this case, both songs were years old (especially Abba…) when they got their moment.
However, the possibility of going viral on Tik Tok is apparently now a pre-requisite to new music releases, with one artist saying her label refused to release her new music until it had a viral moment.
Is the meme-ability of the lyrics to Jepson and Swift’s new songs a happy coincidence, or is Tik Tok subtly influencing the very way songs are written now?
Or, was the first instance of the meme-ing a plant to get us hooked on the song? Apparently, music marketers are paying influencers and mere plebs alike to feature certain music in their videos to get it into the algorithm and encourage others to do the same. It’s a way to weasel the music into our brains, like being in a TV ad used to be back in the stone age.
#2 - The Blue Tick Debacle
If you’ve been following the drama unfolding since Elon Musk was forced to actually go through with buying twitter at the exorbitant price he suggested (maybe as a joke?) back this summer when we were all more innocent, you’ll have noticed his plans charge for blue tick verification.
Stephen King was the first to push back, saying, correctly, eff that, he should be paying me. Musk’s answer was then to go down from $20 to $8 per month, where we seem to have landed for the moment.
Some theories state that this is his plan to make Twitter a profitable endeavour for him after sinking so much money into it. Musk and his minions are trying to show it from a different perspective – us against them.
In what world Musk would be in the “us” is debatable, but he’s trying to market the payment of a service as a revolt against the main, tweeting - "Twitter’s current lords & peasants system for who has or doesn’t have a blue checkmark is bullshit. Power to the people! Blue for $8/month."
If this does go through, will brands pay for the privilege of being verified? Almost certainly. The bigger issue is if it does become a paid service,, will those unwilling to pay lose the right to their own name?
Will politicians and brands and other public figures be forced to pay a monthly fee to verify that they are who they say they are in order to stop other people speaking on their behalf and saying, ABSOLUTELY ANYTHING they want.
Pay to protect your identity or give it up for public consumption. Pretty dystopian.
#3 - Firings On The Global Stage
Another thing we’ve all been watching this week on the Twitter front are the mass firings playing out globally. From the famous “Golden Parachute” layoffs turned lawsuit, a cascade of layoffs across global Twitter employees followed.
As head of Tesla, Musk often got attention for the wrong reasons for his managerial attitudes. While for the most part his eccentric but no-nonsense approach to business was accepted, is what we’re watching now a lesson on how not to do layoffs?
HR leaders weigh in, calling the way the cuts have been done as “weak” and “cruel”, noting that when leaders are this craven it’s mostly due to putting their comfort above others, rather than a necessary evil, as could be argued in the case of a huge scale re-organisation such as this one. The consensus across the HR community is that whatever the scale or the circumstances, leaders should always make room for humanity.
In this case, between the timing, the scale, the lack of communication leading up to the cuts, and Musk’s failure to address the layoffs publicly as they were happening, the mass dismissal “smacked of a particular kind of vengeance” according to Protocol magazine. Are employees being punished for the messy way the sale went down?
Mass layoffs also leave a lasting effect on a company. Those who survive the cuts often never regain their loyalty to a company if those cuts are done callously, as is the case here. Studies show that downsizing a workforce by just 1% leads to a 31% increase in voluntary turnover the following year.
People remember these things about a company culture.
#4 - Meta Follows Suit – Layoffs Abound
Layoffs in tech are becoming quite the trend for the beginning of the winter season, with the artist formerly known as Facebook announcing their first layoffs in the history of ever.
Meta’s share price has been going down since September 2021, currently landing at under $100, the lowest it’s been since 2016, and Mr Z himself humbly announced that the post-pandemic turnover did not go the way he expected, and that he overinvested at the beginning of the year.
Already he’s coming out of this looking better than Mad Musk, announcing the severance that employees will get before beginning the cuts and stating that although the cuts will be likely to hit those on employment visas the hardest, they will have access to help from “dedicated immigration specialists”.
However, before we applaud him for acting like a human person, we may just be blinded by the Twitter debacle. Let’s all take a minute to enjoy this quote from employment law expert Charlie Thomson stating “The Twitter scandal has lowered the bar so far that now it will be easy for Meta and other employers to make their redundancy processes look sophisticated and humane,”. Touché.
And let’s not forget that while the market may be entering a downturn, his obsession with and the amount of money dumped into the metaverse fantasy world may have also played a big part here….
#5 - Slack’s CEO on The Future of Work
If you don’t know what Slack is, your office probably uses Teams. Along with zoom, Slack is one of the stand-out products of the pandemic, despite existing well before. A messaging app between colleagues, with company-wide channels and built-in productivity and project management functionalities, without being able to put our finger on why it’s decidedly more modern and casual than Teams.
Talking about the future of work, the philosophy graduate turned software engineer, and incidentally the creator of Flickr, Stewart Butterfield wants people to think about the future of work as something we can all shape and be actors in, rather than something that’s simply going to happen to us. Noting that rather than churning out speculative articles, we should see ourselves as the creators of the future of work. Noted!
He also incidentally hates the Metaverse, is not on board with the product placement of introducing an cookie emoji into your work software as a brand partnership, as Microsoft just did with Oreo, and doesn’t think managers should be worried about not being able to see everything employees are saying in their work messages.
According to him, the culture isn’t being created on Slack messaging without manager input, but is rather an expression of the larger company culture – allowing it to still be shaped by leadership and employees together.
Brave & Heart over and out.
Bonus
Despite the cost-of-living crisis, users forking out for paid accounts on Tinder are up by 7% globally.
Are we turning to love in difficult times, or just desparately trying to find a way to split rent and heating bills?
To find out more on how we can help you ensure your company culture doesn't take the same hit that Twitter’s has, or how we can help you with digital solutions to your business challenges, check out our case studies.