Companies Communicating Layoffs. Wrong examples only.

Big tech layoffs have been dominating our LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok feeds over the past months. Now we are receiving news that the layoffs will be extending beyond Big Tech and other industries are expected to lay off big amounts of staff.

To this day, new announcements have been made of coming layoffs in March, some examples:

• Accenture will be cutting back 2.5% of its staff (19.000 layoffs)

• Indeed will be laying off 2.200 employees, 15% of their staff.

• Amazon is going for another round of 9.000 employees

In the first quarter of this year, 153208 people have been laid off (when I started writing this newsletter on 24/3. Check the new numbers here.

So let’s start with some horrible ways that people; dedicated employees to a company had found out that they had been laid off.

How not to do it:

#1 Noncommunication by Twitter

If you browse around Twitter profiles you can tell that many employees still are not sure whether they have even been laid off. Twitter has blocked access to their email accounts and no internal communication took place letting these employees know that they had lost their main source of income.

Later it became clear that Twitter did send some employees news in a different way using an automated email bot. Now let’s look at what is wrong with this.

During the first round of layoffs in November, Twitter employees were sent home and waited for this email. If it would be sent to your personal mail you were fired. If it reached your work mail, you were safe.

I have to agree with Gergely on this. Though Twitter made the attempt at communicating through email, there was absolutely no dialogue or way for fired employees to communicate post-layoff, nor was there the opportunity to find some answers pre-layoff.
Remember when you got hired and your HR manager and line manager took the time to hire you? Their good time, doing CV checks, finding out your hobbies, making you a personalized offer. Why does this not extend to the firing?

Now let me quickly show you some other horrendous layoff headlines I have read in the past year:

#2 Some other examples

• Remember this horrible story where is the company ‘Better’ mass-fired 900 employees over 1 zoom call?

  This same company mass-fired another 3000. Most people found out because their severance pay was deposited into their bank account before anything else. To be honest, they could do a lot Better.

• Verizon fired 2700 US employees 2 days before Christmas.

• Gazillion entertainment was notoriously known for being a high-performance (read: Toxic) workplace. Employees were expected to work 50-60 hour weeks and were asked not to take a vacation. When layoffs happened they communicated it via email, there was no severance pay, and accrued PTO was not reimbursed.

Long-term effects of a shitty layoff strategy, or no layoff strategy.

Remember that old partner that broke up with you out of nowhere via text and now you are working every day to make those trust issues and feelings of betrayal disappear?

Companies of large size can sometimes forget that those working for them are not pawns but humans. With real feelings and emotions. When we enter a contract with a company it isn’t just the written contract of ‘I give my time and you give me money’. It is a psychological contract where trust and connection play a huge role. When signing a contract employees give away their time and trust. The trust that the company will not act in a violating matter. An inhumane matter. Guess what, once betrayed, trust is (really) hard to get back.

Mental & Physical health

Research has shown that layoffs have incredible long-term effects on well-being. It is ranked 7th among the most stressful life experiences. The psychological and financial pressure of being laid off can increase the risk of suicide by 1.3 to 3 times to just name one of the statistics.

Bad layoff strategy? Then get ready for a bad reputation

Now I want to stick to the point and not divert too far as to how layoffs impact company-wide performance or employees but stick to the communications science of it. Let’s look at the reputation element.

Reputation is like trust. Once shattered it’s very hard to put back together. Like a mirror. Smash it on the ground and then glue the pieces back together. Doesn’t look so nice now does it?

Bad layoffs and the aftermath of a company’s unwillingness to communicate will come out. Betrayed employees will speak out and sometimes even sue.

Let’s go back to Twitter. The employees who loved Twitter are now on Twitter badmouthing their own employer (and for good reason). As Twitter is a social media and a great place to vent. The effects of this on Twitter’s brand as an employer will be/is severely tarnished.

As relationship coach Esther Perel calls cheating in the digital age ‘death by 1000 cuts’. If you as a company have a bad layoff strategy, employees will talk. Even if they don’t have Twitter they can always use an array of other tools. The tools that your future employees will look at before applying to work at your company.

An example is reviewing the company on Glassdoor. Read this article to find out the relationship between bad Glassdoor reviews and hiring difficulties.
It isn’t just the employer brand that is tarnished if your layoff strategy is bad. Your overall brand will be tarnished. Your employees are what you hope to be your biggest fans. After you treat them badly you can only rely on what you hope to have built-in previous reputation-building activities.

Unfortunately, company x is not the only company with employees who have entered a psychological contract of trust. Most people are indeed in a psychological contract with at least one employer. So they feel the pain that you have caused their employees and will take those conversations to dinner tables, events, conferences etcetera.

Saving face through layoffs, how to be better

From a reputation standpoint. There are some tips on how to manage layoffs better to save reputation. Once again, I can’t speak about overall company performance or other factors.

• Treat your employees like humans.
  They have probably given up late nights with family to contribute to your success. Acknowledge their pain when they hear about a layoff and take time to speak with an employee. This allows people to say goodbye and helps them understand that a ‘fair’ decision was made. Read this article for more information on ensuring fairness. It can make a world of difference for the laid-off employee.
  

• Explain how the decision was made. This also contributes to fairness. Statements like last in first out can help people understand and can help them feel less personally targeted by the company’s decision. Avoid unconscious bias (very often a company loses on gender and demographic diversity during layoffs) and try to lay off based on performance. Unfortunately, this is harder said than done as studies show us that people are let go more often based on personal characteristics than skills and performance.
  

• Say you’re sorry. Acknowledge the fact that you acted during your inflated tech bubble and forgot to set a sustainable growth strategy which made you overhire. Employees know bosses are human too and make mistakes. They will treat you humanely if you treat them humanely. Someone needs to set the right example.
  
  Just please don’t do it like this.

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