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Imagine waking up one morning and lying in bed and checking overnight emails before you need to work in France when you see a message from the company’s chief executive.
Many people say they’ll be fired. The next email is even worse. You will be one of them.
Sitting in bed, doing heart races, grabbing a laptop and logging in to the company network. The password no longer works. It’s time to call France, but I can’t remember the name of the man you were supposed to be calling, or his number. It was all in an email that you no longer have access to.
Send a text message to your favorite manager. He texts back saying that he was fired too. He discovers after trying to enter the office and discovers that the badge is not working.
Finally, you will stand up and reflect on the miserable weeks of your life is about to take.
Vivek Gulati doesn’t need to imagine this. What happened to him almost exactly when he became one of the 12,000 workers dismissed in early 2023?
The 47-year-old software engineer later wrote about his experience in a Harvard Business Review article that exposed the shock of learning about losing his job through email.
This week I followed him. New US monthly data showed that nearly 200,000 layoffs were seen in April. Separately, the survey suggests that the inevitable feature of the pandemic lockdown is a continuing reduction in remote, impersonal work.
According to a survey of the Zety Careers site, 57% of US workers received news via email or phone that they have become redundant over the past two years. Only 30% learned to face to face.
The rest was heard on video calls or office grapevine, except for the unlucky 2% who noticed that they were xed only when they were unable to log in to work emails or messaging systems like Slack.
This undoubtedly happened even before the pandemic. Either way, it didn’t surprise Gulati, who is now returning to Google as a contractor rather than a full-time employee.
As a tech veteran, he has experienced cuts before, but he has no time to think that email may be the only way to fire thousands of people in bulk.
He noted that everyone has a manager who can finish, provide news and provide personal support.
When he lost his job at Broadcom, a US technology group nearly a decade ago, the vice-president called out that the acquisition was inevitable, but he wanted to help. He offered to introduce Gulati to another company he believed would be willing to hire him.
“To this day, I have a lot of respect for that VP and the entire team I worked with,” Gulati said.
It’s understandable as well as the impact on people who continue to work after mass firing but are very afraid of the next round.
That’s just one reason why calling about layoffs is at least one benefit to employers, but that’s not ideal either. There is no way to know what a person is doing at that moment.
Whether they’re not at the bedside of their dying parents or heading to a funeral, they can easily lack privacy like a hairdresser. That was when a popular Australian TV news anchor named Sharyn Ghidella received a call last year on the network saying that her time had passed 17 years later. She later said, “It’s not the chop I wanted.” Her disappointed fans denounced the network of coronavirus and rudeness.
You may need to fire someone. I did it myself, but I hope I don’t have to do it again. But there is no excuse to make cruel moments even worse, especially in companies that have received large-scale resources, by delivering news that has not personalized human contact. The more unnecessarily cruel corporate life is, the better.
pilita.clark@ft.com
