The quiet approach to cuts and streamlining seems to be working for Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer

There are a couple of ways that a company can go about making staffing reductions. They can rip the bandaid off and do it all at once as Business Insider recommended initially. They can use the “sniper-style” surgical cuts over time that Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer has been doing. In this case, it seems that her style has been working out better. The company has cut 1,000 jobs in less than a year since she took over as CEO and nobody seemed to to notice. The morale degradation that Business Insider predicted hasn’t happened as a result of people never knowing if they’re job is next to go, something that they admitted to today. In fact, morale seems to be up across the company. Perhaps most importantly about the way that she’s doing it is that talent is still trying to make it into the 18-year-old tech company. Mayer reported that at their peak they’re getting 10,000 applications per week, double what they were receiving a year ago. The results – Business Insider has reversed their opinion of the strategy and is now commending it.

We wrote that sniper-style layoffs can degrade morale because employees feel like they will never end, and that they will be next. We said sometimes its better to just rip off the band-aid. In this case, we were wrong.

It isn’t just job cuts that are happening. She is also cutting through much of the bureaucratic red tape that has hampered the company in the past. According to Reuters:

Mayer installed a system called PB&J, short for Process, Bureaucracy and Jams. That has eliminated roughly 700 irksome or unnecessary procedures within the company, such as forcing employees to undergo a special orientation for the company gym.

“I understand that we are geeks and we may not be that coordinated but I think we can all figure out how to use a treadmill without an orientation,” Mayer said. We’re not prepared to go back on what we called “Marissa Mayer’s first big mistake” when she called all remote employees back into the office, but it is clear that her efforts are making a positive impact on a company that many thought was on its death bed just a year ago.