Time is ticking for Twitter employees as yesterday (16 November), Elon Musk reportedly emailed staff saying that they must commit to a ‘hardcore’ way of working or be shown the door.
Staff have until 5pm EST today (17 November) to respond and anyone who doesn’t will receive three months’ severance pay and have their employment with Twitter terminated.
In a new leaked email, Musk appears to have specified exactly what he means by ‘hardcore’ working, having listed his six rules of ‘insane productivity’.
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Indy 100 reports that Musk has asked staff to cut down on the number of meetings they hold, writing: “Excessive meetings are the blight of big companies and almost always get worse over time.”
He also said staff should be able to walk out of meetings that they don’t feel are valuable, explaining: “It is not rude to leave, it is rude to make someone stay and waste their time.”
Employees must also be as ‘direct’ as possible and not ‘use acronyms or nonsense words for objects, software, or processes’.
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Still on the communication front, Musk has advised staff to avoid speaking through a ‘chain of command’ and instead approach a person directly.
The billionaire wrote: “Communication should travel via the shortest path necessary to get the job done. Any manager who attempts to enforce chain of command communication will soon find themselves working elsewhere.”
Also another key rule for the Tesla founder is common sense, such as not ‘following a company rule that is obviously ridiculous in a particular situation’.
Oh, and again with the meetings thing, he also added: “Please get [out] of all large meetings, unless you’re certain they are providing value to the whole audience, in which case keep them very short.”
Musk had also hinted at his ‘hardcore’ way of working in a previous email seen by The Guardian.
He wrote: “Going forward, to build a breakthrough Twitter 2.0 and succeed in an increasingly competitive world, we will need to be extremely hardcore.
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“This will mean working long hours at high intensity. Only exceptional performance will constitute a passing grade.”
In his message, Musk directed staff to a link and told them to click it if they wanted to be ‘part of the new Twitter’ by 5:00pm New York time today.
“Whatever decision you make, thank you for your efforts to make Twitter successful,” he added.
UNILAD has contacted Twitter for comment.
Aisha Nozari