Boeing CEO, Kelly Ortberg, has emphasized the need for a more open culture within the company, encouraging employees to share their thoughts and communicate across different departments, according to a partial transcript of a company-wide meeting seen by Reuters.
During the company-wide meeting webcast on March 5, 2025, from St. Louis, Missouri, where the planemaker’s defense and space division is based, Ortberg recognized issues with the company’s internal communication, noting that employees tend to be “very insular” and “don’t communicate across boundaries”, according to Reuters.
He pointed out that teams in the commercial airplanes and global services divisions “don’t work with each other as well as they could”, the Reuters report continued. Ortberg stated that “the power of the Boeing Company is in us all kind of rowing the boat together”. He said that a cultural change would boost morale for the company, which employs more than 160,000 employees globally.
Ortberg said his understanding of Boeing’s problems was partly shaped by a culture working group composed of employees from across the company that was looking at the company’s values and its behaviors. He said he planned to put together an action plan based in part on an employee survey conducted in February 2025, the Reuters report added.
In January 2025, the planemaker reported that it finished the last quarter of 2024 with revenues of $15.2 billion, which was 31% lower than those of the same quarter in 2023, resulting in a net loss of $3.8 billion.
In its financial report, seen by AeroTime, Boeing stated that the final quarter of 2024 had been extremely challenging for the company. Airplane production was greatly affected by a seven-week strike involving 33,000 machinists on the US West Coast, changes in certain defense programs, and the costs incurred through workforce reductions.
In October 2024, the planemaker announced it would issue 60-day notices to around 17,000 workers, which is around 10% of its total workforce. The company began drastic workforce cuts on November 1, 2024. So far Boeing has laid off 2,199 employees in Washington state, 692 employees in Missouri, 593 workers in California and 356 employees in South Carolina.
