Uber is cutting about 10% of its workforce as the ride-hailing and delivery company moves to simplify its organisational structure, reduce management layers and redirect resources towards growth and new technology, CEO said in a companywide email.
said the decision was not driven by weak business performance. Instead, Uber has become significantly larger over the past five years, with its revenue nearly tripling and the company expanding into new products, businesses and markets.
“Today, we’re making a number of significant organizational changes across Uber,” Khosrowshahi said. “We are removing layers, simplifying team structures, refining our global location strategy, and focusing our people and investments against the biggest opportunities ahead of us.”
He said employees whose positions were affected had already been notified, except in countries where local employment procedures are required.
Uber to cut about 10% of employees
The is part of a broader restructuring aimed at making “simpler and faster”, according to Khosrowshahi.
The CEO acknowledged that the layoffs would have a real impact on employees who had worked hard for the company. However, he stressed that the changes were related to Uber’s organisational structure and priorities rather than individual employee performance.
Khosrowshahi said Uber’s rapid expansion over the past five years had created “more layers, more coordination, more fragmented ownership” and structures that were designed when the company’s businesses were much smaller.
The company now wants to reduce that complexity and free up resources for investments in future growth.
Management layers and smaller teams reduced
said it has reduced the number of employees positioned seven layers below the CEO by 20%, while the number of “micro-teams” — teams with only one or two direct reports — has been cut by nearly 50%.
According to Khosrowshahi, the company is eliminating roles that primarily focused on coordination and broadening the responsibilities of some managers.
The objective is to create clearer ownership, speed up decision-making and allow employees to spend more time building products and serving customers rather than coordinating between teams.
Delivery businesses to be consolidated
is also combining parts of its delivery operations.
Khosrowshahi said Uber will bring together its three Delivery Ops teams covering Restaurants, Retail and Direct into single-threaded teams at global, regional and country levels.
The company believes operating the three businesses separately made sense when they were smaller, but the structure has become less efficient as the businesses have expanded.
The consolidation will bring the businesses’ profit-and-loss operations under single owners, which Uber expects will reduce duplication and improve capital allocation.
In its technology organisation, Uber is also combining its Core Services Engineering and Science teams.
Uber to tighten remote-work policy
Another major part of the restructuring is a change in Uber’s location strategy.
Khosrowshahi said the company will concentrate teams in a smaller number of major hubs, with global teams focused primarily on New York and San Francisco, regional teams in designated regional hubs, local teams in country hubs and technology teams in tech hubs.
will also ask the “vast majority” of remote employees to move to an office.
Going forward, only about 1% of Uber employees will be remote, according to Khosrowshahi. The company will continue enforcing its hybrid-work policy, which requires employees to work from an office three days a week.
The CEO said Uber believes the benefits of employees working together in person have become clearer in the post-Covid period.
Savings to be reinvested in growth and technology
Khosrowshahi said the workforce reduction and organisational changes will generate savings that Uber plans to reinvest in areas it considers strategically important.
These include expanding the company’s core businesses, investing in drivers, couriers and merchants, developing new products and preparing for what he called the company’s “autonomous future.”
“We have tremendous momentum, significant financial capacity, and opportunities in front of us that are larger than at any point since I joined the company,” Khosrowshahi said.
He acknowledged that the restructuring would create significant disruption for employees but argued that making one major organisational change was preferable to carrying out multiple smaller rounds of changes.
The restructuring marks a significant effort by Uber to streamline its operations as the company enters its next phase of growth, with management seeking to balance a much larger business with faster decision-making and increased investment in emerging opportunities.