It’s not just tech and media. Companies in a range of industries claim this is the only efficient way to do a lot of layoffs. Informing workers personally is too complicated, they say — and too risky, as people might use their access to internal systems to perform acts of sabotage. (These layoff emails are often sent to employees’ personal email; by the time they check it, they’ve been locked out of all their employer’s platforms.)
As someone who’s managed people in newsrooms and digital start-ups and has hired and fired people in various capacities for the past 21 years, I think this approach is not just cruel but unnecessary. It’s reasonable to terminate access to company systems, but delivering the news with no personal human contact serves only one purpose: letting managers off the hook. It ensures they will not have to face the shock and devastation that people feel when they lose their livelihoods. It also ensures the managers won’t have to weather any direct criticism about the poor leadership that brought everyone to that point.
Legally, companies have plenty of recourse if laid-off employees steal trade secrets or sabotage systems, and employees who need to find new jobs have little incentive to behave criminally, no matter how upset they may be. But even so, concerns about liability shouldn’t preclude treating employees like human beings.
Elizabeth Spiers
The wave of tech layoffs continues to spread from the big corporations like Google and Meta to other, less entrenched players, such as Dell and Zoom. While there are certainly valid reasons for concern over future growth perspectives in the tech sector, the US jobs market at least appears in great shape, and in some cases even after layoffs the companies ended 2022 with more employees than at the start of the year.
The real reasons may be more convoluted and mundane. On some level, this layoff domino could reflect a panic contagion among management: the pressure to be seen doing something fast about the worsening outlook – and since everyone else is firing people, we might as well – coupled with the impression that they can easily get away with trimming their workforce. Elon Musk provided an easy blueprint for this reasoning with his chaotic and indiscriminate gutting of Twitter’s personnel; as long as Twitter is limping along maybe all those employees weren’t quite necessary? But Twitter’s internal disfunctions are easily concealed, as it’s no longer required to report quarterly earnings; various sources have documented large drops in advertising revenue and lackluster adoption of its new Blue subscription.
Another perspective is that management is trying to obscure their own failure to properly plan ahead that led to this supposed overstaffing, and to wrestle back control from their workforce by cultivating insecurity. The latter explanation makes some sense, considering how the layoffs impacted staff with considerable seniority; it’s easy to imagine they criticized their managers internally and this was a convenient moment to get rid of vocal dissent.
Regardless of the motives, the short term thinking inherent to these rash layoffs will likely hurt companies in the middle term. The laxness of US labor code aside, hiring and training people requires significant effort, especially in tech, costs than companies will have to incur again for replacements or reorganizations sooner or later – and being perceived as an insecure workplace might hurt companies’ hiring prospects. Heightened uncertainty will hurt employee morale, their performance and initiative – why would you work extra hard for an employer that might toss you out like a used tissue at the first opportunity? A better, more considerate solution would be to retrain excess employees in areas of strategic importance for the company, or where it intends to expand in the future. But that might require slightly more thinking and effort from management than picking who to fire tomorrow…
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