When the CEO Asks Employees to Blur Work and Life (Insider Comms From Wayfair)

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Wayfair employees can shop on their website for comfortable seating, so they can work longer hours.

Insider Comms brings you the good, the bad, and the ugly of internal memos. Wayfair CEO Nijal Shah’s recent memo to employees earns a spot in our hall of fame for being both bad and ugly.

• Alt. subtitle for this post: How Not to Motivate Employees

In mid-December Shah sent a clunky memo (below) to all employees letting them know that, despite the company “winning,” there is “still some work to do to make sure that we get fully back.”

• Fully back to what? Shah doesn’t answer, but apparently “winning faster” is important.

Shah’s memo is a doozy. There are many issues, including grammatical speedbumps and a general lack of writerly finesse. (It’s clear neither a comms pro nor Grammarly was consulted.)

• Fun fact: “smart” gets four mentions and variations of “winning” get six. “Thank you” gets zero.

The main issue is that Shah lacks empathy for his people. Employees were jolted by emphatic calls to “work late” and blur the lines between professional and personal lives:

Working long hours, being responsive, blending work and life, is not anything to shy away from.

And:

Everyone deserves to have a great personal life - everyone manages that in their own way - ambitious people find ways to blend and balance the two.

Oof. That’s the sound of a founder CEO with a net worth of $1.6 billion who doesn’t need to fret over mortgage payments or daycare. Compare Shah’s memo to a couple of other tone-deaf executive missives ($):

When Your Business Is Failing and You Blame Everyone Else (Insider Comms From Insider)

A Tech CEO Tells Employees to Do More With Less (Insider Comms From Uber)

The budding novelists among us who also watch horror movies between fingers may enjoy this memo for sadistic reasons. How can you not keep reading when you encounter,

Would you spend money on that, would you spend that much money for that thing, does that price seem reasonable, and lastly - have you negotiated the price?

And

Together we can win much faster than we are winning now if we all row in this direction together.

🤦

Here’s the memo.