Over the years, I’ve been on all sides of the lay-off situation: decider, notifier, buddy, decidee, and sniffling commiserater. One thing that I’ve taken from all this is that there is only one way in which the lay-off experience can be at all pleasant. And that’s when the person being pink-slipped has volunteered. This is a win-win-win: the volunteer gets to leave what is likely a rotten and deteriorating situation (generally with a better place to go and/or bit of severance); the manager has one less painful discussion ahead of them; and one person – even though they don’t know it – has dodged a bullet and had their job saved.
When I worked at Genuity, I was fortunate enough to have been one such volunteer. This made lay-off day a bit surreal. My boss didn’t have to bother with me, so I had to root around looking for my exit papers and find someone to surrender my laptop and PDA to.
Even though I felt I’d just gotten a Get Out of Jail Free card (along with 6 months severance when I passed GO), it was not my favorite day in the world, as many of my colleagues were being involuntarily separated.
No, lay-offs aren’t fun.
But there are ways to let people know they’re losing their job, and then there are ways.
In fact, my second Pink Slip post – September 2006 – was devoted to a boneheaded move by Radio Shack, in which they notified employees via e-mail they they were being riffed.
I thought that was wrong then, and my view hasn’t changed.
I’m sure that there are circumstances in which it’s inevitable and acceptable to inform folks en masse that they’ll be moving on: companies going out of business, store closings, plant shutdowns, divisions moving overseas...
But when a job action isn’t a mass one – i.e., when everyone isn’t impacted – common decency calls for someone being informed personally – by their manager, the HR person, or, as in the George Clooney movie Up in the Air, by a hired gun. Ideally, someone’s given the news in person, but sometimes it’s via phone call. Which, in this day and age of the distributed workforce, does happen. I was laid off by phone once, and it was fine. I knew it was coming, and was, in fact, rather looking forward to it. (This lay-off was the result of a pitched and vicious political battle which “our guys” lost.) While I was in the process of being informed that my services were no longer required, I was able to IM two friends who I suspected were also on the domino effect hit list, so they were well-prepared when the call came. (Phone lay-offs, however, are not appropriate if a) you’re standing outside the NICU waiting for a doctor to tell you whether your newborn is going to live – as happened to a colleague of mine; or b) you’ve just driven cross-country in the days following 9/11, you’re a couple of hundred miles from home, and your manager just can’t wait until the next day to give you the word – as happened to a colleague’s husband.
I will admit that there’s something ‘rip the bandaid off fast’ humane about letting everyone who’s being let go know at once. When I worked at Wang, everyone had to stay seated on lay-off day until the Angel of Death had passed by their department. During one particularly severe cut-back, they didn’t get through everyone on the appointed day – which was a Friday. So, all kinds of folks left work not knowing whether or not their number was going to be up come Monday. Far better to have gathered everyone being laid off together and told them that they were out, and give them the information on when and how they could get their paper work done. Yes, being told privately is better – who wants to lose it in front of others – but there is a misery loves company element to the mass-inform that works. So, I’m okay with doing it all at once, as long as it’s not in front of the survivors.
In my book, telling those being laid off that they’re getting the axe, while they’re sitting there with colleagues whose jobs are safe, is just WRONG. Nobody wants their emotions exposed in that sort of forum, and losing your job is a plenty emotional experience.
Despite how crappy it is, “all at once in front of everybody” was reportedly the method chosen by Everything Everywhere – the absolutely ridiculous name that’s sprung from the merger or Orange and T-Mobile in the UK.
As reported in The Telegraph, Everything Everywhere held mass meetings around the country, and threw up PowerPoint slides explaining what was going on.
If your name was highlighted in red, you were considered “at risk”. If you name was in yellow lights, you would have to re-apply for your existing job, where the ranks were being thinned to the tune of 30 percent. The blue light specials would get to keep their jobs, while those in green were getting new ones in the company.
Is this story too bad to be true?
Some of those who commented on a post on this topic on Bitter Wallet said that they had been at one of the meetings at which the announcements were made.
One said that he was at a meeting of 300 employees, and the print was so small that no one could read their name, and had to sleuth out afterwards whether they had a job or not. This, of course, doesn’t contradict the possibility that those attending smaller meetings might, indeed, have seen – and been able to read – their name in lights.
Another commenter claimed the whole thing was “complete twaddle”. “Herbert Fountain” wrote:
The people I’ve come across who seem most upset are those wanting to go who think they’re unlikely to be picked for a pay off, the redundancy terms aren’t bad and both organisations have plenty of long servers, volunteers are not going to be in short supply. I have very little faith in the humanity of my employer but this is balls and should be recognised as such…
Here’s my guess: Everything Everywhere did, clumsily and somewhat callously, put up slides that had peoples names on them, color-coded to indicate their employment status. But this was not anyone’s official lay-off notice. It was just a “communication.”
A better way to handle this would have been to show however many color-coded org charts as they wanted, but to keep people’s names off of them. And it would have been even better if those whose departments were being eliminated, and for whom there was no hope of landing a a new position in the not so eponymous Everything Everywhere, if they had been told this prior to going into a meeting with those whose jobs were secure. If the “redundants” wanted to come to the larger group meeting, fine. If they wanted to stay in their cubicles and weep, curse, or update their resume, fine, too. (Everything Everywhere? What a name! Everything other than a job for you, bub.)
Anyway, to take the sting out of learning you’re being dismissed via son et lumière show, The Telegraph reported that the average payout – Fountain’s “redundancy terms” - would be about £10,000. Not great, but oodles upon oodles more than what a lot of laid off workers in the US would receive, unless unemployment insurance is factored in.
Still and all, lay off notification by PowerPoint preso seems like a not so humane approach to a difficult task. That said, I’m sure we’ll see worse. Any guesses on when the first pink slips issued via Tweet – or the first lay off notice scrawled on someone’s Facebook wall – are going to occur?
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Thanks to my friend, colleague, and blog-mentor, John Whiteside, for pointing this story out to me – as he had, in September 2006, with my first post on the Radio Shack lay-offs. (And we thought we’d seen it all….)
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