A friend texted me from her car in a parking garage in the Pearl at 10:40 on a Tuesday morning. Badge deactivated, laptop collected, a box with a plant in it. She had found out from a calendar invite. Fifteen minutes, no title on it, a conference room she had never been in before.
By noon she had posted about it. By Thursday, four of her former coworkers had too, and the comment threads had turned into a fairly detailed public audit of a company that spent last spring rebranding around the word integrity.
Layoffs are a business decision and sometimes a necessary one. I am not arguing with the math. I am arguing with the belief, still weirdly common in the rooms I sit in, that how you do it is an HR matter and therefore not a brand matter.
A layoff is the most credible brand communication a company will ever produce, because it is the only one where the audience knows nobody is trying to charm them.
There is a scene in Alien where Ripley pulls up the company's actual orders and finds the priority list. Crew expendable. The horror of that film is not the creature. The creature is an animal doing what animals do. The horror is the discovery that the people who wrote the mission had a second document, and the second document was the real one. Every company has a second document. A layoff is when employees get to read it.
So what does yours say. It says how much notice. It says whether severance scales with tenure or with negotiating leverage. It says whether the people cut heard it from a manager who knew their kids' names or from a stranger with a script and a legal review. It says whether the word family, used in a memo eleven months ago, meant anything.
The companies that come through with an employer brand intact tend to do a few unglamorous things. They tell people early, even when counsel prefers late. They pay above the minimum. They let people say goodbye instead of walking them to the elevator. They state the number out loud rather than letting rumor set it higher. And they do not, under any circumstances, describe the day as a growth opportunity.
Everyone who stays is doing arithmetic about themselves. Recruiters are reading. So is every candidate who will look you up in 2020, and Glassdoor does not forget.
A layoff is when employees get to read it.
My friend came over Sunday. Truffles sat on her lap for an hour, which he does not do for me, and Barnaby knocked a glass off the counter until he was included. Neither of them asked what she does for work. It was, she said, the first conversation all week that did not require an answer.