Work from the office, get laid off at home: Was that a good idea?

Sarah Kessler, Lauren Hirsch & Michael J de la Merced

Last week, McDonald’s asked corporate employees, who usually work from the office at least three days a week, to do the job from home. The plan was to lay off hundreds of employees, it was learnt, and the company preferred to deliver its news virtually.
 

McDonald’s isn’t the only company to tweak the lay-off playbook. In January, Google laid off thousands via email. And Mark Zuckerberg, the Chief Executive Officer of Meta, last month announced plans for a year of big cuts in a 2,000-word memo, explaining that Meta staff “wanted more transparency sooner into any restructuring plans.” 
 

Like many work norms, how to fire people is being rewritten in the wake of the pandemic, when downsizing companies often had little choice but to make layoffs via Slack, Zoom and email, and often did so sloppily. With offices open again, and remote work more common, companies now have options — and it’s not necessarily clear what is best for workers. 
 

“If we had this conversation three years ago, I would have said this is cruel and unusual punishment,” said Bob Sutton, a professor at Stanford and the author of The No Asshole Rule, about remote firing. “But it’s changed so dramatically since the pandemic that I’m confused.”
 

Virtual or in person
 

Cynthia Huang, a senior marketing manager, was laid off from a consumer goods company with a hybrid work policy in February. Because she was working remotely that day, she got the news via a video call; others were let go at the office.
 

Huang said she preferred getting the call at home. “It felt more comfortable than if I had to physically walk out of the office, have everyone watch me, get all my stuff,” she said.
 

Laying off people at home may sometimes be more compassionate in the hybrid-work era, Sutton said. “If you call people into the office who don’t go into the office very much to lay them off, it’s kind of weird,” he said.
 

When layoffs are done remotely, managers may not fully feel the human cost of their decisions, Sutton said: It’s “a little bit easy come, easy go.” And with an in-person notice, workers have a chance to say goodbye to co-workers.
 

Kim Scott, a former Google executive and the author of Radical Candor, suggested that awkwardness or embarrassment could be avoided by planning ahead — for instance, having an extra conference room for people to collect themselves and an option to collect belongings after hours.
 

The medium matters
 

A video call with your manager beats the impersonal email. “It’s very hard to care personally over email,” Scott said, and experts question the wisdom of Zuckerberg’s pre-layoff announcement.
 

“You have to be prepared at the same time to talk to people about both the process that you’re going to go through and what people will get offered if it turns out that their jobs are at risk,” said Sandra Sucher, a professor at Harvard Business School. 
 

Scott advises a tight window between announcing and executing layoffs. “That makes everybody feel nervous,” she said of the Zuckerberg approach.
 

But even the most considerate version of letting someone go is still painful. “It just felt very like there wasn’t that, like, human touch,” Huang said about her experience. “But I don’t think that was necessarily because it was virtual versus in person. I think it’s just the nature of a layoff.” — Sarah Kessler

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