Stop the Madness!

While making decisions about people are the most difficult one’s leaders have to make, I have been shocked to hear and read about multiple tech companies having notified their people that they are being laid off by email. It is easily understood why these companies reached the point of having to make these decisions, but how they went about is completely wrong. Other companies have gone similar routes in recent years and been criticized for doing it that way, so why did these companies think notifying people by email was the right thing to do? Did the HR leaders in these companies really support this?

The best leaders and managers I know would not lay people off through email. They wouldn’t even consider it. While it is sometimes necessary for companies to take such actions, people deserve to be treated with dignity and respect. This can only happen in a conversation directly with a manager and an associate. The hardest thing to do as a manager is to tell someone that their job has been eliminated, but that is a part of the job you signed up for when you became a manager.

One of the companies that took the “layoff by email” approach talks regularly about how 90% of their employees say it is a great place to work coming out of the 2021 Great Place to Work Global Employee Engagement Study, way above the industry average of 57%. This is clearly outstanding and is not easy to achieve, but do they think their recent actions will allow them to maintain that 90% rating or will this ruin years of hard work? It will be interesting to see if the consequences of this one action will result in the employees that are left thinking differently about whether it is a great place to work.

Laying people off is sometimes required for a lot of different reasons and is never an easy decision to make. How you go about laying people off though is largely within the control of leaders and managers. I sincerely hope that the “layoff by email” approach does not become the norm. We can do better.?