This week in HR, I’m turning to trending hashtags, chirps, and a Form 8-K SEC filing for inspiration. We learned on Twitter and from buzz in every major news outlet that Elon may be attempting a takeover of Twitter. Simultaneously, there was an abundance of articles highlighting internal turmoil at Twitter. Employees, long accustomed to operating comfortably within a monolithic echo chamber, raged against the possibility of a Board shakeup that could threaten their license to advance a definitive worldview. And as Elon’s ambitions change from board membership to potential ownership of Twitter, there’s more employee anxiety than ever. Other companies, like Substack, are even offering positions to nervous Twitter employees. Shareholders would be foolish to ignore Elon’s proposed $43B offer to buy Twitter.
Twitter’s Form 8-K filing stated that Twitter and Musk had come to a constrained share purchase agreement that would effectively stave off a hostile takeover by Musk. His share-buying is limited to 14.9% of the company’s common stock – a stake he presently holds. In exchange for accepting this constraint, Musk would be given a seat on the board. Evidently, this wasn’t good enough for Musk, who shortly after made his own SEC disclosure, declining the offer to join the board, and offering to buy Twitter outright.
I alluded to employee sentiment in the introduction and will now elaborate. Hopefully, you’ll appreciate why an HR writer is rambling on about SEC filings and boardroom rules. Twitter employees reacted in a predictably narrow fashion, from virtue-signaling and moral outrage to predicting Twitter’s strategic peril; no positive tweets made headlines that I could find. I started getting a tight feeling in my brain, as more news and speculation on the matter bombarded us, especially when the employee tweets and “trusted sources from within Twitter” surfaced with dire predictions about Musk’s deleterious impact on the firm. Why is the world so interested in Musk’s involvement with Twitter? The reason this news is so groundbreakingly ubiquitous has everything to do with Twitter’s product and Twitter employees’ relationship to it. Twitter purveys information in a matter of 280 characters or pictures, and its employees are charged with controlling that information. Incidentally, the world has favored Twitter with an outsized share in the information polyphony (many voices at once).
I speak a ton about purpose and meaning in work – the “Why?” behind the “what” that employees do for businesses is the most important thing employers need to understand, communicate, and harness. When the “why” behind work is as significant as what Twitter employees perceive theirs to be, the idea of a philosophical sea-change by a boisterous change-agent as widely known, feared, admired as Musk, can be earth-shattering, existential. Twitter employees who are so distressed at any prospect where Musk is involved in their lives must perceive Musk with skepticism, and it seems most express unvarnished hatred for him – or at least his kind. What is his kind? People who value unrestricted information-sharing? Skeptics of woke-ism?
I am not on Twitter, nor do I plan to be, as a strict opponent of dialectical meme-ology and polemics. I do, however, appreciate the average fear employees might have when their “why” lacks a defense at the highest levels. Change in general is almost always unsettling and there are real business costs when factions of workers resist change initiatives. Most of the time, change is necessary.
From miles away, I would guess Musk will be successful in the short-term with whatever machinations he’s got up his sleeve—as he drives up the share price for Twitter. Employee resistance will help to purge the fatted workforce of Twitter, which will increase profits and value to shareholders. But a company that is so resistant to change, usually isn’t aware of glaring blind spots in their strategy. And that’s why change is usually avoided at the peril of even the most successful businesses. Think Jack Welch, who famously steered GE away from embracing the world wide web marketplace that was just emerging in the 1990’s. GE was already losing its grasp by the time the sea-change that was the internet punched them in the gut, and this one miss-step was really just a final straw. Similarly, Twitter’s resistance to strategic change a la new leadership, like Elon Musk, which many recognize as an obvious imperative for Twitter’s sustainability, could be the final nail in its coffin.
Whatever side of the dilemma for Twitter employees you’re on, the reason this is an important case study for HR is that there are serious costs to organizations in these critical moments. This whole stunt is almost a hyperbole of change it’s so dramatic. At a basic level, Twitter employees’ raison d’etre is under siege, which is like a new product initiative at your company, or the adoption of a robot to replace the checker at the grocery store, or the outsourcing of a principle business function such as IT. Change happens every day at every business at a micro level, and sometimes it's voluntary and sometimes it’s imposed. However change comes, HR’s role in concert with leaders’ efforts is at least to help implement the following phases of change management (Referencing Kotter’s Managing Change):
- Quick, clear, honest messaging about what is known about a change initiative or change agent. Craft a new “Why” for workers worried about losing purpose,
- An earnest effort to win employee sentiment and buy-in through trust-building and coalition building,
- Developing and communicating a vision for a new future and a strategy for achieving the vision,
- Getting rid of obstacles that prevent employees from their most efficient and best work,
- Introduce new incentives and milestones that reenforce employee alignment,
- Anchoring new methods and assumptions in your culture.
Culture actually undergirds every bit of this. A culture that is more receptive to change makes for a more agile business.
