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I was at Yahoo under Marissa Mayer, who instated a weekly Friday all-hands, FYI, obviously modeled on whatever Google had. Those who worked at Yahoo before her
by henrikschroder 7y ago
I was at Yahoo under Marissa Mayer, who instated a weekly Friday all-hands, FYI, obviously modeled on whatever Google had. Those who worked at Yahoo before her said that it was a huge change, because previous upper management was pretty much invisible, no-one knew who they were, what they did, what they were thinking, which direction the company was going in.
So even if you're 100% cynical about it and thinking the all-hands are just internal PR, it was still a positive change, because you got to see upper management, see them talk about where the company was going and why, and they had to "defend" their direction.
Of course, the flipside to this is that if it seems like upper management doesn't have their shit together, meetings like these make that obvious, which can torpedo morale.
- libria 7y agoSo transparent competence > opaque incompetence > transparent incompetence.
- umeshunni 7y agoNot 100% sure, but didn't Yahoo have TGIFs in the 90s?
- inerte 7y agoCan agree. I was also at Yahoo when FYI was implemented. It was 45 minutes of scripted presentations, followed by Q&A (and later, raffles :)) The Q&A part was great. Super-awesome to know the executives will at least try to answer any random question that got enough upvotes during the week. Of course we would sometimes get the canned "we will look into that" answers, which Marissa would tell the exec to come prepared with the real numbers next time.
- busterarm 7y agoI work at a company that has a variant of the TGIF as a decade-long company tradition. The PR is there and sometimes the raffles, but the Q&A is non-existent and whenever bad things happen the meeting is skipped for a few weeks. Everyone notices the weeks that get skipped and it sends a huge signal.