UVA-OB-1218 Jun. 26, 2018
Uber: #WhatDoYouDo?
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You can’t believe your day started out this way. Looking at an email on your screen, all you see is the title of it: “My boss just propositioned me for sex on my first day.” The sender was a 24-year-old woman named Susan Fowler, a site reliability engineer (SRE). The date was December 4, 2015. As a rising star in the human resources group of a hip and successful tech company, you were used to headaches. They were part of your job. Handling them—the gripes and complaints of an overworked staff during the hypergrowth start-up years—got you promoted to vice president at 28 years old. You are now the recently hired CHR of Uber, a ride-share company on the cusp of an IPO. This messy email was one of many issues you just inherited. You reread the email from Fowler. Unfortunately, the words didn’t change. A screenshot from the company chat was attached. On it, Vlad Ziegler, the young workaholic manager of the SRE team had written, “At the risk of getting in trouble (I always seem to here—ha!), I would love to grab drinks and see where it leads with you. I have a girl, but it’s an open thing, ya know? And she’s getting laid like every weekend. Ha! But I’m ALWAYS working. All for the glory of mother UBER, right?!! Anyway, tough to meet girls. And to get laid!! What u think? Drinks?”1 “My, my, my,” you say under your breath as you head to the company Box to read all the collected information on the fiasco of which that first email was only the beginning. You have an upcoming meeting around the issue with the senior executive team in a couple days that will be followed with an all-hands meeting. While you were aware of the general situation—indeed, you were encouraged to take the job by a hard-hitting entrepreneur and board member—the more you learned, the more you realized you lacked the whole story. Now you wonder: How did you get here, and what will you do? Clash with Human Resources
Poking through documentation, you discover that two days after the Ziegler email, Fowler sat before her direct HR supervisor, Christine Suarez, in a glass-encased conference room in Uber’s San Francisco headquarters. Fowler spoke first. “Ms. Suarez, I…” 1 Created from information in Susan Fowler’s blog post: Susan Fowler, “Re