Videos of the Layoff

First, we read employees’ public posts about their layoff, commiserating with others. Now, we watch videos leading up to and during layoff.

In one video with 3.8 million views, we see jewishmillenial, a tech employee, await her layoff meeting at home. What’s useful to organizational leaders is to see the other side of the process—the employee’s perspective. We see her dread after receiving a “mysterious” 30-minute meeting scheduled with her boss’s boss and others in her group, one by one, “disappearing off of Teams.”

She gives us a periodic countdown to her being laid off, at one point, wondering why the company doesn’t just schedule a meeting for everyone instead of multiple individual meetings they have to wait for. Others complain about mass layoff meetings and having all technology immediately cut off. They believe the layoff is “inconsistent” or random and not performance based.

No one approach is perfect for everyone. A performance-based layoff at Cloudfare and other companies are also criticized. The Cloudfare one didn’t include the employee’s manager—just HR people—so that didn’t go over well. The HR representatives couldn’t answer her questions about why she was laid off or what the performance metrics are. The CEO did admit that managers should be involved in these meetings and that employees shouldn’t be blindsided by news of their underperformance. Of course, we don’t know how clearly performance feedback has been communicated in these cases, but we could say that the immediate manager lacks accountability. More typically, managers are involved in these meetings, whether performance based or not.

What makes us watch these videos? The voyeuristic pleasure of the layoff meeting is undeniable, and perhaps we feel a mix of empathy for the person, gratitude for still having a job, and fear of losing our job. For business communicators, they’re a reality show for one of the more difficult meetings a manager (or HR) will have, and we can learn how to plan and facilitate these interactions better.