Been laid off a few times. Many people will disagree with this, citing necessary privacy, but if your goal is to avoid being "cruel," my advice is to let people keep their work files. Obviously with some restrictions... one programmer can't clone your entire repo, people can't take customer lists, etc. But work product that people produced, you should allow them to take it with them. Costs you nothing to copy some files.

My last firing was a blindside, got the cardboard box and security escort. What really bothered me, for a long time, was that all the programs, tools, reports, analytics, processes that I had built were all taken from me. Tons of complex SQL queries, all the code for all the programs and dashboards I created, many non-trivial Excel models, business simulations, all kinds of little experiments with different data tools, much more. The amount of time it would take to rebuild would have been enormous (years, easily), but of course I couldn't anyway without access to the data sources. Additionally, no examples to show or ability to build a portfolio for future interviews, etc. The company would have lost nothing by sending me a clone image of my PC's hard drive, which I requested multiple times.

Money is nice, sure, a little safety net, but the work itself is often irreplaceable.