Boeing needs to change its insular culture, CEO says in company-wide meeting

SEATTLE, March 5 (Reuters): Boeing (BA.N) CEO Kelly Ortberg told employees on Wednesday the company needs a more open culture where employees are encouraged to speak up and communicate across divisions, according to a partial transcript of a company-wide meeting seen by Reuters.

“We’re very insular” and “we don’t communicate across boundaries,” he said during the all-hands meeting webcast from St. Louis, Missouri, the headquarters of its defence and space division.

Teams within the sprawling company, which also includes commercial airplanes and global services divisions, “don’t work with each other as well as we could,” he said. “And the power of the Boeing Company is in us all kind of rowing the boat together.”

Ortberg said a cultural change would boost morale for the company, which has more than 160,000 employees globally, and “the results will show in the marketplace.”

Boeing declined to comment on his remarks.

The company lost nearly $12 billion in 2024, and it has struggled to stabilise production of its best-selling 737 MAX, its 787 and several fixed-price defence programmes, including two replacements for the US presidential jet, Air Force One.

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Previously, Ortberg, who came on as CEO in August, has said the company has lost its “iconic” status and that resolving its safety and quality problems requires changing Boeing’s culture.

Ortberg said on Wednesday his diagnosis of Boeing’s issues was informed in part by a culture working group composed of employees from across the company that was looking at its values and “probably more importantly” the company’s behaviours.

He said he planned to put together an action plan based in part on an employee survey conducted in February that received responses from 82 percent of staff.

Of the results, he said: “I think they’re going to be brutal to leadership, quite frankly.”

Asked by an employee about developing better managers, Ortberg said the company was “going to step up the leadership development activity” and urged managers to listen to and care about their staff.

In October, Ortberg announced plans to reduce the company’s workforce, then about 170,000, by 10 percent. The company issued at least 5,000 layoff notices in the US, mostly in November and December, based on publicly available records.

Ortberg on Wednesday praised Boeing employees’ commitment to the company through its years-long struggles.

“You know, to be honest with you, the fact that we don’t have huge attrition in the company, given what we’ve been through, is shocking,” he said. “But it’s because people are like, I want to be a part of turning the company around, I want to be a part of getting Boeing back to the reason I joined the company.”

“The thing I wish I could change is how we deal with each other,” he added.