Our President & CEO Hayden Brown sent the below message to our team today.
Hi Team,
Today I am writing to share the difficult news that we will be combining and changing some teams in our organization, as well as reducing our full-time and hybrid workforce by 21%. For a company with a mission centered around creating economic opportunity, reducing our workforce is a painful step to take, and I know it is hardest for those who will not be a part of our next chapter. For those of you who will be leaving Upwork today, I want to thank you for the energy, commitment and LUV you have shown for our customers, your teams and your work here. While these are incredibly hard decisions, they are necessary to better align our organization with our strategic priorities and with the realities of the market. Each of you has played a role in making Upwork what it is today, and these decisions are not a reflection of your talents or contributions.
What to expect today
I want to start by letting you all know what to expect today. I recognize the impact this will have on each of you and our teams, and that one of the most valuable things I can provide in this moment is clarity.
If your role is being eliminated today, you will soon receive a calendar invite for a conversation with a leader or manager on your team. The subject line will read Important Role Update. Our priority is to ensure you have the space and support to process this news and have the necessary information you need for this transition. Wherever possible, we will be conducting 1:1 meetings; however, there will also be some group notifications. For those of you in this situation, we want you to know that we prioritized speed of connection because we want you to have clarity and the information you need as soon as possible. I know this may be a difficult transition, and we are committed to supporting you in all the ways that we can.
If your role is not being eliminated, you will receive a note shortly from your ELT leader, who will confirm that you are remaining with the organization moving forward. If you are experiencing a change to your role, reporting line or manager, you will also receive a calendar invite to touch base on what these changes are. The subject line will read Team/Manager Update. This invitation means your role is intact, but with a different manager, reporting line or team structure. Our priority today is communicating with impacted team members. Tomorrow, we’ll come together for ConnectUp, where we will share more and talk about the road ahead.
Context on this decision
We arrived at this decision with the utmost care and consideration, informed by the climate in which we are operating and clear principles around how we need to work going forward to be even more effective. Over the last several quarters, in our All Hands and ConnectUp meetings, we have discussed the economic and business headwinds that our industry is facing. Against this backdrop, we have been diligently working on our goal of driving durable, profitable growth, building our category and delivering value for our customers. As you know, our growth headwinds accelerated in May of this year and led us to lower our full-year revenue guidance in August. Over the course of this year, we initiated a series of measures to control our destiny in this more challenging environment and to set the stage for enduring success. While these actions have enhanced our offering and successfully stimulated incremental GSV and revenue growth, today’s announcements represent the additional steps needed to respond to market realities and to achieve the focus, speed and organizational alignment we need to deliver on our highest-impact priorities.
Our guiding principles
The guiding principles we used to make these decisions further the trajectory we have been on and reflect how we are committed to working together as a team moving forward. These principles are:
Flatten and streamline org structures to unleash greater team and individual impact:
- Strengthen our Business Unit (BU) structure by more tightly coupling our marketing and product functions. Empower our General Managers (GMs) and team leaders to move with greater velocity, decision-making authority and scope.
- Streamline our support functions, reduce duplication and focus on our highest-impact work.
- Optimize our ratios of managers to individual contributors and product managers to engineers.
Assemble small, nimble teams equipped to attack a more sharply focused portfolio:
- Realign teams to focus on our top priorities. Sunset lower-performing and lower-ROI projects and shrink R&D teams where smaller teams will move faster and more successfully towards the goal.
- Radically focus our Enterprise sales and support resourcing on our largest, high-ROI customers, enabling us to rapidly improve profitability in this business while still enabling smaller customers to succeed with lighter-touch models.
- Leverage insights from our several quarters of successful new product tests, including the recent Upwork Business Plus launch on 10/16, to continue to drive high-velocity land and expand motions for midmarket and larger clients through more product-led growth and a new higher-value and higher take rate SKU versus the current Marketplace offering.
Embrace our startup roots and disposition to innovate work itself:
- Enhance our “player-coach” culture. This is particularly essential in today’s fast-moving world of AI, where the best way to understand what’s possible is to have firsthand experience trying it out—every single day.
- Empower teams to take more risks and simplify processes that are overly complex or slow us down unnecessarily.
- Drive more automation across the business. We’ve made strong progress on this front across areas including customer support, engineering and finance—and more is possible.
The broader environment is challenging, and I am committed to and confident in our ability to be agile, to innovate and to navigate needed changes together while staying focused on our goal of creating unsurpassed value for our customers. Today is a hard day, but the resilience of this team in pursuit of our mission and opportunity is proven, and is an enduring source of strength.
At this time of change, I know we will create the space to demonstrate the care for one another that is a hallmark of our people, values and culture. To each of you: You’ve made critical contributions to our customers and business, and for that, I thank you.
Hayden
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