Layoff Communication Should Be Driven by Compassion
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A Wall Street Journal article describes HR’s debate about the best way to communicate the bad news of layoffs, and I’m reminded about my own experience. When I worked as an HR director for a company in the 90s, we laid off people a few at a time—for more than a year. It was a dreadful process and left people on edge for months at a time (death by a thousand cuts). Years later, a guest speaker for my crisis communication class at Cornell said her company’s philosophy was, “Cut fast and cut deep.” It seemed both harsh and more humane at the same time.
We did layoffs on Fridays, so employees had the weekend to cool off and talk with their families rather than gripe to coworkers. Today, Wednesday seems to be the magic day to give employees a chance to talk with HR. (We also had some employees—mostly tech—clear out their desks immediately, with security tagging along, an embarrassment to everyone involved.)
New technologies offer more realistic ways to connect with far-flung and remote workers. A face-to-face meeting may still be best for bad news, but Zoom is a reasonable alternative. Why fly someone across the country to fire them? (Cue scenes from one of my favorite business movies, Up in the Air.)
The article offers other sound advice for employers:
Communicate before layoffs to prepare employees. (We kept people in the dark, although some could have seen the “writing on the wall,” as we said.)
Train managers so they don’t make it all about them, for example, by saying, “This is so hard for me.” (At the same time, Yahoo! training slides were leaked years ago, and the company took a lot of heat.)
Provide at least a month of severance pay and waive employee stock-vesting cliffs in exchange for signed separation agreements, although some companies offer more. (Companies have a sliding scale based on level and time with the company.)
Consider outplacement assistance. (Typically only for certain levels.)
This leaves many decisions unsettled. How are senior managers treated differently? What’s the timing of messages? Typically, a general email and town hall precede individual conversations. How do those take place? What’s communicated to so-called “survivors”?
I don’t look back fondly on my time communicating layoffs—developing spreadsheets and training managers about the process. I’m embarrassed about how decisions were made and communicated. This article recommends transparency, which was an issue back then, but it makes no mention of compassion, which is the greater concern and would drive transparency and other character displays, such as accountability. I’m glad to see the conversation among HR people. It’s better today than the old “pink slip” days before my time. But companies are driven by employees’ public backlash on Twitter, Slack, Blind, and other sites—not by their own leadership character.
