Is There a Lesson to Learn from Twitter’s Staff Reduction?

At the beginning of this month Twitter had, reportedly, about 7,500 employees and 5,500 contractors.

In an effort to stem the cash flow bleeding, Elon Musk fired about half of the employees and all or most all of the contractors.

That means an organization that previously had around 13,000 people was instantly reduced to about 3,500 people or a 75% reduction in force. With no time to plan. No time to do knowledge transfer.

Then Musk told the remaining staff that they needed to be extremely hardcore and more staff left. While the number of people who left last week is unknown, it is being referred to as a mass resignation.

Lets say, for the sake of argument, the number who left last week might have been 250 or 500.

That might leave about 3,000 + people or less than 25% of the original workforce.

In any organization, some of the organization’s DNA lives in people’s brains. And ONLY in people’s brains.

In the case of Twitter, I suspect that a significant amount of that secret sauce is now gone. Given the way the reductions in force were carried out, many of them are not going to be interested in helping out.

We don’t know how brittle the Twitter infrastructure is, but we are likely to find out. If it is brittle, we will see the effects of losing all that knowledge in the coming days, weeks and months.

Twitter even had to close its offices again because they didn’t even know for sure who the remaining folks were.

But this is not really a story about Twitter. This is a story about your company.

How much of your secret sauce lives in people’s heads? Is not documented in writing? Do you even know the answer to that question?

Which key people, if you lost them, would threaten the company’s existence? How many people would it take? Is there one?

This is an opportunity to consider where those weaknesses are and fix them.

Hopefully no other firms have to reduce their staff by 75%, but often times, when people leave, either voluntarily or due to a business downturn, the people who do leave are the ones you would like to keep. This was exemplified by Musk’s efforts on Thursday afternoon, to get key people to stay. While we don’t know the outcome officially, reports are they those efforts were largely unsuccessful.

The best lessons to learn are those that are not painful to you. Use Twitter’s pain to look to see if you need to build in some redundancy or resiliency.

If you need help with this, please contact us.

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