“You didn’t even try”: a laid-off employee’s story
“Today, we had to say goodbye to beloved team members…”
Emily opened the email, read those words, and could only laugh. It was sent from the CEO… but not her CEO. Not anymore, at least. She was one of those “beloved team members” who had only hours earlier been notified she was being laid off. They hadn’t bothered to remove her – or the other 130ish newly laid-off employees – from the company email list.
That email from the CEO was just the latest in a string of disorienting messages Emily had received that day. The first email had blindsided her, and just about everyone else in the organization. The gist of it was this: 7% of the workforce is getting cut and you’re included in that number, but don’t worry, we’re going to take care of you and all our people. That last piece would end up ringing hollow.
Leadership seemed to be trying for the impression that they were kindly providing a quick exit and a soft landing for their soon-to-be former employees. This particular Thursday would be Emily’s last day, and her access to all company systems would be cut off at its close. Before that, she would get to meet with her leader and someone from HR. She could keep her monitor, keyboard, and mouse.
In reality, all that this accomplished was adding insult to injury. It was meant to appear like the company was doing Emily a favor, but she knew better. The equipment would have been highly difficult to get returned and sanitized for future use. These weren’t really parting gifts, it just wasn’t worth it to take their stuff back.
Oh, and that final meeting? The leader Emily was supposed to meet with wasn’t hers, and she soon found out that was because her leader was also being laid off. In fact, there didn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to who had been cut and who hadn’t. New people, people who had been there for 20 years, marketing, product, IT, didn’t matter. It was as if someone had taken a spreadsheet and deleted rows at random until it calculated a number they liked.
Of course, there are no good ways to lose your job. There are only better ways and worse ways. Emily had to experience an all-around mess, and unfortunately she’s not alone. Layoffs have been in the headlines for months now with no signs of stopping, and that’s just the ones we hear about. Countless workers have been affected, and no doubt countless more will be affected in the coming weeks and months. It gets lost in the press and in the conversations around the press, but these are people we’re talking about. They deserve, at the barest of minimums, to be treated like people and not just names on a list.
What’s even more infuriating and confounding about all of these layoffs is that in many cases they didn’t have to happen. The supposed motivations differ from org to org – cost-cutting measures, prior over-hiring, recession fears, etc. – but too often, it becomes clear that things didn’t have to turn out this way.
That was definitely the truth in Emily’s case. Just a few short weeks after she and her colleagues were laid off, she noticed a LinkedIn post from the very same recruiter that had brought her into the company in the first place. It was an announcement that the company was hiring for an IT role.
Emily couldn’t believe it. Many of the employees who had been laid off so very recently had been working in IT and could have stepped into this new role right away. She looked further and saw the company was hiring for another new role in marketing. Sure enough, some of the laid-off employees could have easily filled that job, too. With reskilling or some plain old training, just about any of them could have.
It didn’t make sense. Why did the org cut so many people loose just to turn around and try to source new people with the same skills? Why would they waste so much time and money and effort just to take one step forward when they had already taken two steps back?
As Emily puts it, “you didn’t even try.” She would have gladly stayed if she had been offered other positions or had the chance to explore them for herself. Plenty of her fellow laid-off employees would have likely stuck around too. Maybe not all of them could have been placed elsewhere in the org, but some of them could have been saved. Some of that time and money and effort to replace them could have been saved if layoffs were treated as a last resort and not Plan A.
Instead, all trust has been broken, she and her colleagues aren’t coming back, and the business has to live with the consequences – financial and otherwise.
It didn’t have to be this way for Emily. It didn’t have to be this way for her former employer. It didn’t have to be this way for so many of the other employers and employees caught in this bewildering cycle of layoffs. Next time you see a headline about a company executing mass layoffs, head over to the careers page on their website. You’ll see open roles there, guaranteed. Chances are you’ll see a lot of open roles there, and every single one will cost the business to fill.
Until our world of work recognizes the cognitive dissonance between laying off and hiring at the same time, until talent mobility and redeployment are embraced on a wider scale, this will continue to be the case. Hopefully, a day will soon come when talented, dedicated employees like Emily can stay and grow – and their employers can find they’re all the better off for it.