Letting Personnel Go Gets Impersonal Touch

"A Detroit-area engineer with more than two decades at General Motors woke up one Friday in November to a predawn text on his work phone.

It carried an ominous message: Check your email.

By the time the engineer logged into his inbox, as the text instructed, his wife had already seen the news on television. The automaker was trimming another 1,000 jobs.

A form letter in the engineer's email informed him that his employment at GM was over, but no one from the company called him. There was no all-hands meeting. No one-on-one chat.

If he felt the need to speak with someone, the email gave a number for a call center.

In the hybrid-work era, some companies no longer feel obligated to deliver bad news face to face, or even over a Zoom call. A pink slip can come via a text message and email.

GM's approach shows that the ways companies dismiss workers are evolving, human-resources specialists say, during another season of end-of-year layoffs. In recent weeks, employers including Boeing, Sotheby's and others have announced job cuts.

The tactics companies use in dismissing workers vary. Boeing said in October that it would cut some 17,000 jobs, or about 10% of its global workforce. Shortly thereafter, Boeing let workers know that most layoff notices would go out in mid-November. Managers generally met with employees one on one, either in person or virtually, to break the news.

At Sotheby's, which is laying off more than 100 people, some employees found out this month about cuts happening at the auction house after they saw people crying at their desks, The Wall Street Journal reported. The company relied on HR staffers to call colleagues into meetings one by one to offer them severance packages.

HR staffers have long obsessed about how best to conduct layoffs. Some insist that midweek terminations -- on a Tuesday or Wednesday, for example -- are more humane than a Friday dismissal, since it gives employees time to deal with paperwork during business hours. Chief executives, meanwhile, have attempted to perfect the art of the all-staff layoff memo that gives employees some rationale for cuts without explaining too much.

All layoffs are fraught with anxiety, HR specialists say, one reason the mechanics of the dismissals keep changing.

"This is one of the most difficult messages an employee will ever receive, and that a manager or others will have to deliver," said George Penn, managing vice president in the HR practice of Gartner, where he has advised companies on layoffs and other issues. "How do we take what is the worst scenario for an employee and find a way to help them through that process?"

During the pandemic, many businesses grew accustomed to sending employees emails if their jobs had been eliminated -- a practice that largely remains today. When software maker Intuit in July cut 10% of its staff, or roughly 1,800 employees, CEO Sasan Goodarzi told workers that they should look for a specific calendar notification from their managers.

Those being terminated from the TurboTax maker got an invite to a meeting titled, "Leaving Intuit Discussion." Those who didn't receive such an email could "assume they are not impacted and we ask that you support your colleagues as they process this news," Goodarzi wrote in a note to staff at the time.

When Tesla laid off employees this year, the automaker sent emails in the middle of the night. Some people were locked out of their devices and had to suss out the situation on their own with managers and friends to determine what happened. After Elon Musk took over Twitter in 2022, employees also learned they had lost their jobs via email.

The online approaches can backfire. In 2021, online mortgage lender Better.com fired hundreds of workers on a Zoom conference call, which was later posted on TikTok and viewed by millions. The CEO of the company later apologized, saying he "blundered the execution."

Workplace advisers say that, ideally, employees should learn they are losing their jobs from a supervisor, division head or someone they have previously met. Such a personalized approach can avoid angering staffers or making an already difficult situation even tougher, said Stacey Berk, a former HR leader at food-service provider Sodexo, who now runs the advisory firm Expand HR Consulting.

"It's a human being here. They're losing their job," Berk said. "We can take a half-hour out of our day to have these discussions."

At GM, occasional layoffs are a fact of life at the U.S.'s largest automaker. The Nov. 15 action was GM's second round of about 1,000 cuts in four months.

In a statement to the Journal, the company said it was grateful to the workers that were affected. Because the layoffs had an impact on employees globally, GM used email to ensure that workers found out at the same time, a representative said.

"This was just wrong," said John Martin McDonald, a retired communications executive who used to work in the same department at GM with its now-chief executive, Mary Barra, in the early 2000s.

McDonald, who left GM in 2010, found out about the layoffs from two previous GM colleagues who were let go via email after decades with the company, he said. That prompted McDonald to criticize GM and his former boss in a post on LinkedIn.

"It creates an impression, and rightly so, that 'The company doesn't care about me,'" he said. "'I'm another number. I'm another cog in the wheel.'"

A former recruiter at GM, charged with finding new hires, said the experience contrasted with the time she was laid off from a different company six years ago.

At her prior employer, she received three separate calls from people at the firm that day to check on her well-being and logistical details like severance and health insurance.

On Nov. 15, the recruiter found herself locked out of her GM computer, and she had to retrieve the hotline number and wait on hold before confirming her suspicion: She, too, had been laid off." [1]

1. Letting Personnel Go Gets Impersonal Touch. Otts, Christopher; Cutter, Chip.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 23 Dec 2024: A1.