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A Masterclass in Delivering Bad News Badly
The facts around the layoff of staff from Twitter have emerged over the last week or so. Many former Twitter staff reported they found out they were dismissed by being logged off company systems or by email.
Now there is no nice way to be fired but something as impersonal as an email takes the biscuit. I can see the attraction, it avoids a difficult conversation, it allows things to be done quickly and it is absolutely black and white. There are no ghost employees hanging around doing nothing for months waiting to hear their fate after a redundancy round has been announced.
It is short-termist in the extreme though. While it solves the problem of the down in the mouth leavers hanging round it creates a whole host of problems with the retained employees. Employee loyalty will be zero, seeing your buddies treated with little or no respect will leave a bad taste. The first exit opportunity and the best talent will be gone I suspect. At the very least they will be thinking about their employer in a whole different way relative to what they did pre-announcement. Nobody will believe a word from HR again.
I have been involved in 2 different layoff rounds at two different companies in my…
