Opinion | Layoffs by Email Show What Employers Really Think of Their Workers - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/29/opinion/mass-tech-layoffs-email-google.html
Google’s parent company, Alphabet, recently announced that it would lay off around 12,000 people, 6 percent of its work force. Employees who were let go, some of whom had worked for the company for decades, got the news in their inbox. “It’s hard for me to believe that after 20 years at #Google I unexpectedly find out about my last day via an email,” a Google engineer, Jeremy Joslin, tweeted. “What a slap in the face.”
That sting is becoming an all-too-common sensation. In the last few years, tens of thousands of people have been laid off by email at tech and digital media companies including Twitter, Amazon, Meta and Vox. The backlash from affected employees has been swift.
Employees at a tech company called PagerDuty received notices last week that set a new low bar for a layoff announcement, starting off with a few hundred words of cheery blather and rounding out with a Martin Luther King Jr. quotation about overcoming adversity.
As someone who’s managed people in newsrooms and digital start-ups and has hired and fired people in various capacities for the last 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.
Since then I’ve hired and trained first-time managers, and taught them how to do this in a way that respects the dignity of the people who are losing their job: Look people in the eye. Answer questions. If someone is upset, show some sympathy. Treat people the way we ourselves would wish to be treated. At the very least this demands an actual human conversation. It is more effort than sending a platitude-laden mass email, but it demonstrates respect.
Perhaps the most appalling aspect of termination by email is the asymmetry between what corporations expect of their workers and how they treat them in return. Employees in all kinds of jobs are routinely pressed to give the maximum that they can. In low-wage service jobs that can mean insane, unpredictable hours with no benefits. At higher-paying tech jobs it can mean sacrificing any semblance of a life outside of the office, a requirement that is often justified by high-minded rhetoric about changing the world or the promise of some pot-of-gold reward in an unspecified future.
The expectation that an employee give at least two weeks notice and help with transition is rooted in a sense that workers owe their employers something more than just their labor: stability, continuity, maybe even gratitude for the compensation they’ve earned.
But when it’s the company that chooses to end the relationship, there is often no such requirement. The same people whose labor helped build the company get suddenly recoded as potential criminals who might steal anything that’s not nailed down.