John Riccitiello on Morale at Electronic Arts

With 1,500 people getting the axe at Electronic Arts, you have to wonder what morale is like within the publisher's walls. Are employees walking around in a melancholy state, wondering if their jobs will be "downsized" next? We decided to ask EA CEO John Riccitiello specifically about the morale of his employees. 

“I think it bounces around from group to group," he responded. "Look, no one likes layoffs – me either. But the people in the company, given a choice between a company that wallows in the dirt and one that makes hard aggressive moves to make it the market leader that it could be, they prefer the latter. None of the 1,500 people think they were the right people to be let go, and that hurts. You just can't be that objective about your own individual job. I think everybody that remains, the vast majority of them understand the logic, they agree with it and support it and think we're a stronger company for the moves. And they are ALL excited about our move into digital and direct-to-consumer, which is something that probably wasn't true two years ago when I described the strategy."

Reactions from investors and negative reports in the press can be detrimental to the attitudes of EA's employees, however. Riccitiello continued, "I would say the headwinds on the stock don't make people smile. I think most people in the company read our press release on our Q2 and first half, and said, 'Record market share, record revenues, profitability roughly in line with the street... that sounds like victory.' A lot of negative articles were written that entirely missed the point that we felt we had a great first half. We're cash flow positive, we're profitable, we're growing, and what we've chosen to do is a strategic step in the process of resetting our company to a different strategy. Sometimes people almost believe more what they read in a newspaper than what they hear from their own company. A great deal of what's written is often ill-informed and misunderstood. So it's a hard thing for morale from time to time.”

Also see: EA CEO: Betting on PS3 Put Us in a Position of Weakness