BEING UPFRONT
“I think at the end of the day, employees appreciate when you’re transparent, direct, and authentic. So they know who you are and who you aren’t,” says Mary Francis, Global Head of People & Organizational Development at Uber. “It’s kind of like dating, right? It’s not a fake-it-’til-you-make-it type of thing. People are eventually going to find out who you are. So you might as well just be really upfront.”
Frank wisdom from Francis, discussing Uber’s new values. She calls them an anchor that helps inform decisions tied to the company’s identity—or in her words: “Who we are and what we stand for.”
This new set of values drives how Uber achieves its very ambitious new mission of reimagining the way the world moves for the better. Francis’ team was tasked with finding the current value set as opposed to “creating” one. According to Francis, these values already existed across Uber, and they represent the measured and intentional evolution of the company’s culture over the past few years.
MAKING AN IMPACT
With regard to her career path, Francis says she didn’t know what to do with her life early on. Thankfully she acted on her father’s sage advice about the importance of getting close to the customer. She also took an important lesson from her mother—to come from a place of curiosity. Following this guidance, Francis spent the first dozen years of her career in sales, eventually migrating to marketing for several multinational companies—including PepsiCo and Levi Strauss, which brought her to the Bay Area.
Then, after a decade, she decided she wanted to do something every day that impacted people’s lives directly.
“For me, that meant exploring psychology and organizational behavior,” she says.
She went back to school and completed a master’s, and then a doctorate, honing her natural interest by becoming an organizational psychologist.
“I did that as an independent practitioner for about 8 years via my own boutique consultancy. That gave me a great chance to experience a lot of different industries—everything from high-growth startups to really large corporations,” Francis says.
Satisfied with the breadth of companies she had seen, she then focused on drilling deep and driving internal impact.
“For 8 years I’ve been in tech companies in the people development and organizational development space,” she says. “I’ve been at Uber for a year and a half now. And our aim is to help drive business impact through people and to bring out the best in people in order to drive our performance and culture.”
VALUES
It was almost 2 years ago that Uber decided to take a step back and redefine itself globally. The company had gone public and expanded into new lines of business, and leadership wanted to get fresh eyes on its mission and values.
From expansions in Delivery to innovations in Freight, “We are innovating at Uber every single day,” Francis says.
In describing which of the new Uber values are most meaningful to her, she says:
- “At the core of our DNA is one of our values: we say Go get it. It’s about bringing the mindset of a champion,” she says. “If you look at high-performing athletes, it’s not really about how they perform on their best days—it’s about how they respond on the worst days. I’ve never been a part of a company like Uber where we truly run towards the fire. And we play to win for the people we serve because it truly matters to us.”
- “Another value I would highlight is that we are absolutely Trip obsessed. We ask ourselves at this point of our journey, ‘How do we truly make magic?’ Some companies are absolutely customer-obsessed. Here at Uber, we keep the needs of all stakeholders in our marketplace front and center: the earner, the rider, the eater, and the merchant. At Uber, we consider every side of our marketplace in order to get the right balance for everyone. And that, to us, is where the Uber magic happens.”
- “A value we cherish at Uber is Build with heart. You can see that everyone really deeply cares about how our products affect people’s lives. We really do put ourselves in the shoes of the people who connect in the marketplace. And this allows us build better products that positively impact our communities and partners.”
- “One of our values is Great minds don’t think alike. We deeply believe that diversity makes us stronger. We seek out diversity, whether it be diversity of ideas or ethnicity, experience, education—you name it. When we reflect the incredible diversity of the people who connect on our platform, we make better decisions that benefit the world.”
- “Another powerful value we have is One Uber, and it’s really about this idea of building for something bigger than the individual. Behaviorally speaking, that means that we support our teammates, and they support us when we hit those inevitable bumps in the road. Betting on something bigger than ourselves makes us One Uber.”
- “We are a data-driven company, and one of the values that we have is See the forest and the trees. We can step back and see the big picture on a global scale, while also leaning in and rolling up our sleeves by focusing on those important details, those small improvements, which can compound and offer enormous impact over time.”
- “Out of all the values, Do the right thing is the one that we carried over from our previous value set, and it is perhaps the most central to Uber. At Uber, we do the right thing—period. Which means there’s not a manual. Having values is important because we trust our employees to make judgment calls based on those values.”
HOW WE LIVE IT EVERY DAY
When Uber started the work of redefining its mission and values, one of the objectives was to avoid creating a hugely aspirational list that didn’t truly resonate with its people.
“A lot of companies that I’ve been a part of have misstepped when they tried to create a list of values that folks don’t even recognize. I think one of the things that’s been helping us really live these values out of the gate is that our people recognize themselves in the values,” she says.
That anchor—those values—holds strong as Uber continues its growth. This is the third evolution of Uber’s mission and values as the world itself has evolved into a more palpable “the future is present” reality.
“A big differentiator that is working in our favor as we embed our new values is that this has been leader-owned by design,” Francis tells us. “We started with Dara and his leadership team with our mission and values. We then pressure tested them with employees via focus groups. Between the leaders truly owning it, as well as our employees having opportunities to opt-in and get involved in the implementation phase, we are well on our way to solidifying, embracing, and celebrating the magic of Uber.”
DRIVE YOUR GROWTH
In 2021, for the first time in its history, Uber developed a unified approach to professional growth called “Drive Your Growth (DYG)”. The aim was to be clear to employees how they can drive their own career growth—as well as how the company supports them in those efforts.
“We also wanted to take on the opportunity of creating on-demand resources and opt-in live learning sessions. To introduce the approach to career growth we had a Drive Your Growth week where we had over 60 opt-in live sessions around the globe. That was just the beginning, however, we continue to offer a wide portfolio of career growth options including mentoring, a marketplace for stretch assignments or “Gigs”, coaching, and more. Ultimately the best way to grow at Uber is through doing. Because Uber is a high-growth company, countless experiences exist for employees to drive their growth,” says Francis.
In fact, following the DYG initiative, the company saw a 7-point uptick on its internal pulse survey, an annual tool to check in on employee views, attitudes, and perceptions of Uber, in employee sentiment around the question of whether Uber was a great place to grow a career—and that’s seven ticks up from what was already a healthy baseline.
“Our employees have been telling us, ‘Wow, now I understand that I get to be in the driver’s seat of my career, and Uber has a vast amount of resources.’ Being the hyper-growth company that we are, we have opportunities each and every day to stretch ourselves through the work that we do,” she says.
THE FUTURE
When people talk about being part of a rocket ship, from a career standpoint, they’re typically talking about smaller organizations. The opportunity to be part of one that is the size and scale of Uber, and that has the resources and is willing to commit those resources to the ongoing development of its employees, is a unique opportunity.
Uber is already using these new values in their recruiting, working toward the idea that everyone hired will have not just the core competencies, but will also believe in and embody these values.
In other words, if the new values resonate with job seekers, they should be aware that Uber is already looking for them to add something essential to the company.
“What sets us apart as a company is that we really drive impact through not turning our back to adversity, but actually moving toward it,” she says. “And so, if you’re a person who draws energy from that, Uber is going to be a great place for you to thrive.”
