Travis Kalanick apologised to all Uber Technologies Inc. employees on Tuesday in an open meeting. The CEO of an American worldwide online transportation network giant, apologised for the cultural failings at his company after an ex-employee accused that she was harassed and discriminated against while working in Uber Technologies Inc.
The meeting lasted for more than one hour and along with the company’s CEO, board member Arianna Huffington and Uber’s chief of human resource also spoke at the company’s headquarters in San Francisco. According to spectators, Kalanick deeply apologised for the company’s shortcoming like lack of diversity in the workforce, unperturbed attitude towards employees complaints. After a rough start to the year, employee morale is bleak, one of the people said.
“Travis spoke very honestly about the mistakes he’s made—and about how he wants to take the events of the last 48-hours to build a better Uber,” “Change doesn’t usually happen without a catalyst. I hope that by taking the time to understand what’s gone wrong and fixing it we can not only make Uber better but also contribute to improvements for women across the industry.”
Huffington wrote in a company blog post.
On Tuesday, Kalanick saving the legacy of the company told the crowd that he’d work on improving as a leader.
“If the world, and Uber specifically, takes one thing away from this, it should be that this is not an isolated incident,”
Aimee Lucido, a software engineer at Uber, wrote in a personal blog post.
Notably, this is not the first allegation of misogyny and dispiriting work culture in Uber. In a February 2014 GQ profile, Kalanick said people referred to the company as “Boob-er” because it helped him attract women. A few months later, Uber employees in France offered riders a chance to be driven by “sexy girls.”
Soon after this patriarchal controversy, Uber manifested that it could track its user’s locations in “God View.” The next month, Uber’s general manager told a reporter that he had been tracking her location on his phone in NYC. That same month, Uber executive Emil Michael suggested that the company could hire opposition researchers to look into critical reporters. Both remain at the company, and Michael is one of Kalanick’s top lieutenants.
