A photo of a Twitter manager sleeping on the floor of the company’s office, tucked into a sleeping bag and her eyes covered with a mask, reflects the new work dynamic imposed by Elon Musk: goodbye to remote and flexible work; It’s time to work against the clock.
“When your team is working hard to meet deadlines, sometimes you have to sleep where you work,” replied Esther Crawford, head of product news and pictured.
Criticism was not long in coming. They interpreted the new situation as the imposition of a new pharaoh who intends to build his digital pyramids in record time at the expense of the health of his employees. However, Crawford noted that it was a voluntary decision to “accommodate the needs of his team, who are working from around the world to bring something new to life.” He also emphasized the exceptional situation of a company that has been under the mandate of a millionaire for less than a week. It is a radical change in business and work culture. “All teams are doing their best: from design and product to marketing,” he concluded.
Twitter is another in Elon Musk’s history
Despite the fact that hundreds of users have given up, these practices are not unprecedented or new under Musk’s leadership. He himself slept inside the factory for weeks in 2018 to minimize delays to Model 3 production, as he felt he would waste time traveling home and showering. For a millionaire, it is vital that work as much as possibleand he was always very strict with his employees: they have to make sacrifices to launch rockets and mass-produce electric cars.
He is also a big supporter of office work and rejects remote work except on rare occasions. This is a big contrast with the culture that has reigned on Twitter until now: work how, as much and from where you want. Musk is not interested in this flexibility; prefers hard work, fast and under pressure. Some employees enjoy racing against time and knowing that they are within a unique company at the head of the most prolific entrepreneur at the moment, but many others prefer to have a normal position where their work is not incompatible with their personal relationships and family life.
Information Crawford convinced himself becomes more and more important and responsible within Twitter after Musk’s arrival. The same has happened with Yoel Roth, head of security and integrity, who has already been publicly mentioned on several occasions despite his politicized tweets in the past, in which he claimed that there were “Nazis in the White House” during Trump’s tenure.
Despite everything, more productive than ever
The staff Twitter never existed working so hard and so fast. He was assigned complex tasks in record time, and many high-level employees see these tasks as a test because their jobs could be in jeopardy. Musk just wants to be around people who work hard and do well, and this Friday he plans to cut 3,700 jobs to make the workforce more efficient and cut costs.
We have to remember that Musk invested 44,000 million to buy a social network that barely makes money. You have the banks on top, you have to increase revenues, reduce costs and offer the necessary changes to attract hundreds of millions of new users to make it all work. He’s currently met with a rock and an anvil, despite the fact that he’s dedicated from his Twitter account to conducting polls or asking activist and politician Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to stop complaining and pay the $8 her brand will cost now on verified user blue.
Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter, has always felt that the company was being stifled by a management that only cared about keeping its position and getting paid, and was not inclined to innovate or turn the social network into a protocol. With Musk at the helm, there will be numerous changes and in record time, because it is no longer a public company accountable to shareholders. Yes, you will have to pay bills to the banks that loaned you money, and above all to the users of the social network. It’s not enough to get likes, you need to get paid to use the premium features you want to roll out in the coming weeks.