"I started doing it on a different floor for that reason so that people just didn't even have to worry about standing. Well, I worked in a very tall building standing and waiting by the elevator while everyone stares at them," she said. "People don't want to go chat about how they just got fired." She added: "The next speech that happens after all those people leave the building is the speech where someone comes out and is like, let's hear it everybody!"
We won’t mince words: Layoffs suck. They heap very real stress and chaos onto very real people’s lives. And as we’ve seen reported lately, big waves of layoffs are hitting several companies—and thousands of people—hard right now. This pile of not-good news sparked some questions for us, like: Why are layoffs a go-to cost-cutting lever? What pre-layoff org design decisions put employers and employees in this gnarly position? And why does every CEO letter announcing mass layoffs sound like it was written by the same robot?
In today’s episode of Brave New Work, Aaron Dignan and Rodney Evans, who’ve been on both sides of the layoff aisle, spend time with these queries and dig into:
- The all-around messiness of the traditional layoff process
- Why companies default to short-term thinking when the boom times boom
- Dehumanizing layoff practices we should shelve for good
- Creating clear containers and agreements for handling layoffs
- How we could design a layoff moment that’s truly people-positive
Our book is available now at bravenewwork.com
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