Having lived (and/or died) through many layoffs during my long career in the notoriously layoff-happy tech sector, I can fully appreciate it that there's no easy/pleasant way to hand someone a pink slip.
My full-time corporate career was largely in the physical world. While work from home was technically possible during much of the time I was working in corporate, it was a rarity. Over time, of course, as technology evolved, and employees were kitted out with laptops, as conferencing systems became a thing, and as everyone acquired a mobile phone, working from home became more common. But it was still largely special occasional.
So if you were going to be laid off, it was going to be in person. And mostly, you were going to hear the news, in person, from an actual human being. Some combination of your manager and an HR rep.
This wasn't always the case. I had a colleague who worked for a small company that took this route: on lay-off day, all the employees were handed a color-coded card. Those who'd been issued a pink card were ushered into a conference room and told they were being let go. The lucky blue card holders went back to work.
And sometimes the "in person" thang didn't work out.
I worked with someone who was in the NICU with his newbie son - a life and death situation to see whether the little guy was going to make it - when he received a call from his boss, who laid him off. When boss got off the phone, he walked out of his office, smiled, and said 'I really enjoyed that.' (This guy was an amazingly mean-spirited and god-awful person. One of the biggest assholes I ever worked with.)
But as the workplace - along with every other aspect of our lives - has increasingly digitized and gone virtual, so did layoffs.
Employees now learn via text or email that they no longer have a job. Sometimes, people found out when they were locked out of corporate accounts (including email). Nice!
Personally, I think that this is pretty crappy. Call me old fashioned, but whether in person, or via phone, or via zoom, there should be a live person at the other end of the message - even if that live someone isn't the person who can explain all the details (severance, next steps, picking up personal items...).
But email is apparently becoming an "it method" to get a mass notification about a mass layoff out.
But Google (at least in NYC, which is where this story came out of) managed to screw up the email approach.
In the wee-hours of the morning, they sent an email to all those being laid off. The email had a shelf life of three hours. If you didn't catch it in time, you found that you no longer had access to your account when you tried to log in.
But if you were and employee who came into the office in person, and the sort of odd-ball who DOESN'T check email before you head into work, here's how you found out:
You swiped your badge to get through the door. Green, you're in. Red, you're no longer a Google employee.
How crushing. How demoralizing. How humiliating.
Seriously, I don't care how many thousands of people are getting let go. Most managers don't have that many direct reports. Anyone who's a manager can make a call. By all means, tightly script what they can say. But, if you're a manager, you need to be able to have a difficult conversation with someone in your group. If you can't, or won't, well, you're not qualified to have people reporting to you.
And no, it's not fun or easy. Unless you're the sado who enjoyed laying off the guy keeping watch in the NICU, it's really hard. Toss and turn time. (Been there, done that.)
I understand that Alphabet/Google had to cut its workforce. Or at least felt they did.
They'd been on a hiring spree and, as the company's chief exec, Sundar Pichai said in an employee email:
“We hired for a different economic reality than the one we face today.” (Source: NY Times)
The good news is that, even if - with all the recent tech layoffs - bouncing into a new job may not be easy, the layoff package is decent.
Alphabet said that United States employees would receive a severance package that includes 16 weeks of salary, plus two weeks of extra pay for every year they worked at Google. Laid off workers will receive six months of paid health care. Compensation for workers outside the United States will be determined by local labor laws, the company said.
What's not decent is letting someone show up at the office and finding that their badge has been disabled.
The year is still young, but so far they get my Worst Execution of a Layoff Award.
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Thanks to my sister Trish, who pointed out the deactivated badge story to me.
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