I wrote a post recently back about my near-death experience due to lack of sleep after being asked to lay off five people. The Wall Street Journal, right on cue, publishes an article entitled “Layoff Tactics Keep Changing, and the Blunders Keep Coming” (paywall). It seems that when Amazon decided to lay off 14,000 (!) employees, it did so via email. No sleepless nights for those managers! Instead, they could sit back and sit a coffee while their employees receive an email with the subject “Update Regarding Your Role at Amazon”. What could it be? Are they giving us extra PTO? A raise, perhaps? No! You’re fired!
Please understand that my story was not intended as a sob. I would never suggest that people in leadership positions should be relieved of this horrible burden. I did suggest, however, that senior executives should share the burden with their managers so that they remember what it is they are doing. The people being affected are human beings, not numbers on a spreadsheet. It’s hard to look someone in the eye and do a bad thing to them. It’s easy when they’re only a number. Just ask Pol Pot.
When I made “the call”, I was always given a script. I didn’t like to use it. I’d just call the individual and tell them straight up what was happening. If I stumbled over my words, so be it. I’d rather sound like a human being. If I had to take a beating from an angry person, well, could you blame them? There are some people who I think have never forgiven me. I felt that way about the guy who laid me off back in 2009.
Of course, this corporate spinelessness when executing rather cruel actions is nothing new. We all remember the Bobs in Office Space who found out the Milton was actually no longer a real employee, but was still receiving a paycheck. They just “corrected the error” because “we like to avoid conflict whenever possible.”
HR people always try to put a positive spin on these things. Pretty soon, expect the layoff email to have a subject line like this: “Congratulations on your exciting new life change!”. They’ll follow it with all the usual corporate garbage about turning negatives into positives. “When you lay people off with dignity, you prove your values are real. When you do it via text? You prove they were just words,” says one of the employees quoted in the story. Well, maybe your problem is believing corporate value statements are actually real.
Target laid people off via a collective Zoom call, perhaps slightly more humane than an email. But the Zoom call glitched, people didn’t hear what was happening, and then learned it via email.
My own layoff was hilarious. I was working at a Gold partner and we had our quarterly all-hands with the CEO. “I want you to know there are layoffs going on today, but everyone has been informed. If you’re on this call, you’re all clear.” After I hung up my phone rang, and it was my VP telling me I was a goner. Awkward!
I can’t do much to change corporate culture. But the easier we make it on ourselves to screw up people’s lives, the more we will do it.