You avoid the rumours by being transparent about what's going on. It's not like it's not going to be public in a few hours anyway.
Plus if I were your competitor I could probably head hunt 5-10 of your key lay offs and probably have them recreate your IP just based on their collective memory, anyway.
This paranoia should stop. It's covered by NDAs and such, anyway.
I was using it in reference to the cooperate/defect choice in the prisoner's dilemma. It's a term of art in game theory.
If it is of value then why are you letting them go instead of producing something else of value in a follow up? Layoffs would be a squandering.
All the reactions you described would happen no matter what type of delivery mechanism the company uses, and it is very likely that the response will be worse if you aren't up-front and honest about it.
If I was working at Bird right now, I'd be brushing up my resume and jumping ship at the first opportunity available, since they clearly don't care about their employees' peace of mind.
Let's say my company is going through rough times. We all know something is coming. Anxiety levels are up.
Let's say my leadership knows many of us are going to be laid off. They know I am going to be laid off. They give some vague heads up to us all so they can pat themselves on the back about how honest they are, but they won't tell us if we're on the chopping block. No, instead we will have individual meetings with our leadership over the next several days.
That's several days of my leadership knowing and not telling me. Several days of spiking blood pressure every time my boss wants to talk, wondering - is this it? Several days of not knowing what to tell my wife. Several days of not knowing what financial plans to make. Several days of trying to decipher facial expressions of the people around me.
Reasonable people can disagree. I can't tell you that you're wrong. But I can tell you that a vague announcement followed by days of waiting to see if the other shoe will drop does not strike me, personally, as open and transparent.
So at this point, what should the leadership do, in your opinion?
Alternatively, that's several days for you to start making contingency plans. Anxiety and negative feelings are entirely unavoidable in mass layoffs. You have to do it one way or the other.
Really needs to be same day, and really should be possible to be same day.
Also, at least in the UK, there's a process to go through and once you realise you're going to have to make redundancies, you _have_ to tell everyone affected that their jobs are at risk. I know such things are anathema to much of the US.
I don't agree. With an ahead-of-time announcement like that, it gives employees time to prepare for the possibility of being laid off. I.e. working on resume, reducing home budget, etc.
I don't disagree that people are capable of taking risk mitigation steps in the absence of open and transparent information.
But that doesn't mean the absence of open and transparent information is somehow rendered open and transparent.
Overall my point is this: if I'm going to be laid off, the open and transparent thing to do is to tell me as soon as practicable, not to withhold that information just to facilitate a one on one conversation that may or may not meet an unspoken emotional need. There may be reasons for doing the latter, but I view openness and transparency as being antithetical to the withholding of important information.
I think people are objecting to announcing "Layoffs are coming" and then having to wait some period of time to find out who is included.
The timing is also important, what's being discussed isn't "in 12 months" but immediately given the quick turn in cash flow for many of these companies due to a big external event.
But while there isn't a "great" way, there are many "bad" and "worse" ways. The story in this post is one of them.
Edit: Just to be clear I'm not defending Bird or absolving them of blame, I'm just describing how these things can happen.
If news gets out before all the details are finalised, so no-one is blindsided by the announcement when it happens, some people will have lots of time to have sleepless nights and complain about how they're not being told whether they still have a job; and people you hoped to retain will start sending out CVs.
If news is kept secret until you know every last precise detail, people will be upset this problem has come out of nowhere without them being warned, and that they weren't trusted with secrets, and that they weren't consulted on who in their team would be fired.
And of course, in an announcement to 400 people, you'll have at least one person who'd have preferred the other option...
440 people. Take ten senior people, CEO included, and divide the list into groups of five. News is delivered to bunches of five at a time, calls capped at five minutes, with one-on-one follow-up calls to be scheduled for later in the week.
After forty-five minutes, you’d be done. Those forty-five minutes will be mayhem, and you probably want to disable company services at the start of that process, but it would be better than this. (Next up, do the same thing at the team level to reassure those staying.)
This is one of the costs of a flat hierarchy, by the way. You don’t have managers who can work in parallel.
Orchestrating 400ish one on ones via Zoom wouldn't have been that much effort. I assume they could have spread it across several leaders.
Edit: From their careers page..."while prioritizing a culture that celebrates diversity, inclusion, and integrity"
Work everyone hard until that last day. Do it on the last day of the month so they have no health insurance the next day.
Been there.
If it leaks and you have a mutiny that's a disaster.
Really, it's very lose-losel
People will feel betrayed no matter what.
But having to actually lay hundreds of people off? TBH I'd probably outsource it to a group of specialists. I could see myself delivering bad news to a handful of people but that many... I'd be useless a few hours into the first day.
I get that we don't want people doing the professional equivalent of being an awful partner until your S.O. initiates the breakup, but surely it would be useful to let firms get creative when drastic measures are genuinely needed.