CHAPTER 8

DECENCY WHEN IT’S TIME TO SAY GOODBYE

Here’s the reality: Most laid-off individuals can come to terms with the fact that separations are a fact of work life in today’s dynamic business environment. But what they have not, and should not have to come to terms with is a downsizing that is mismanaged through lack of preparation, insensitivity, or neglect of human dignity and respect.

In Business: The Ultimate Resource, a compilation of essays by the editors of Perseus Press, management psychologist Alan Downs proposes that layoffs are an engagement factor. “Downsizing is often executed with a brisk, compassionless efficiency that leaves laid-off employees angry, and surviving employees feeling helpless and demotivated,” Downs says.

Helplessness is the enemy of employee engagement. It produces a work environment of withdrawal, risk-averse decisions, severely impaired morale, and excessive blaming. All these put a stranglehold on organizations that, in this economy, desperately need to excel. “How you treat people really matters—to the people who leave and the people who remain,” warns Downs. If layoffs are inevitable, treating departing employees with dignity and decency will go quite a distance inside and outside the office.

To many people, job loss is the equivalent of divorce, even death, because of how intimately we identify ourselves with what we do for a living. For that reason, outplacement consultants find that at times it will feel as if they save lives. At their best, they are transfer-of-strength agents, transferring their strength to temporarily strength-depleted people—people who have lost not only their jobs but also an essential element of their identity. The job seekers have lost not only their salary income but their psychic income as well.

To some, the loss of their job threatens their reason for being. Separated people can slip into depression, self-destructive behavior, and, more rarely, violence targeted at others. In many cultures, the risk of suicide associated with job loss is well known. In Japan, for example, it is estimated there may be as many as 90 suicides per day, many related to workplace stress and job loss. That risk of serious trauma following job loss is partly what gave birth to the outplacement industry.

The Art of the Layoff

Many companies do everything in their power to avoid layoffs. Sometimes, however, economic realities make that impossible. When layoffs are imminent, small decencies can make a difference. A simple managerial commitment to small decencies during and immediately following a layoff does nothing to interfere with the economic necessities that forced the layoff. Small decencies put into play during and after this most difficult of management tasks—the act of separating an employee—will signal a leader’s sensitivity and caring, and a commitment to everyone who is watching. And here’s a critical point: everyone is watching and listening during and immediately after a downsizing.

This is no time for managerial myopia. Employees may be separated, but it’s not so easy to erase the memory. “Survivor’s guilt” is a real issue that can be managed, but only if it is acknowledged. So, also, must retained employees face the soul-crushing questions—“Am I next?” and “Is it over?”—that preoccupy retained employees after a downsizing. The use of the word “survivor” by a culture to describe the state of people still employed after layoffs underscores the life-and-death stakes at work. Ignoring the fact that the retained employees have been affected can result in long-lasting adverse impact on productivity and morale.

Layoffs may be inevitable. But when they are necessary, leaders who aspire to decency keep the following points in mind, as recommended by Guy Kawasaki, formerly chief evangelist of Apple and the author of The Art of the Start:

•   Take responsibility. Some managers who inform employees that they are being separated are acting on instructions from a superior. Nevertheless, it is disempowering for the manager delivering the layoff notice to hide behind some version of “Don’t blame me, I’m just the messenger.” As true as that statement may be on some level, it evades responsibility and makes it easier for the firing manager to act callously. Invoking such boogeymen as competition, globalization, market conditions, or whatever macro forces can be blamed also evades responsibility. It’s usually two people in a room plus a witness.

•   Cut deep and cut once. Some leaders believe that economic conditions will get better soon, so they lay off the smallest number of people in anticipation of a miracle. Often the miracle doesn’t materialize, and the company ends up making multiple cuts. Multiple layoffs are more demoralizing than one layoff.

•   Timing is everything. One hour after the management team discusses the need to lay off employees, Kawasaki notes, the entire company will know that something is happening. “Once people know a layoff is coming, productivity drops like a rock. You’re either laying people off or you’re not—leaders should avoid the state of ‘considering’ a layoff.”

•   Whack “Freddy.” For Kawasaki, “Freddy” represents the relative, friend, or friend of a friend that everyone knows was hired as a favor to the CEO or top executive. Freddies are often marginal employees who seem protected from accountability. When a layoff occurs, all eyes will be on what happens to “Freddy.” Did Freddy survive the cut, or was his job eliminated? Cronyism has no place in a corporate culture that aspires to decency.

•   Share the pain. According to Kawasaki, when employees are losing their jobs, the decent thing for leaders to do is to be sure the termination is aligned with other cost-containment moves. That might mean retiring the corporate jet, moving to smaller offices, turning in the company cars. Flying coach. Staying in motels. Give away the box tickets to the ball game. Give your 30-inch flat-panel display to a programmer who could use it to debug code faster. Do something, however symbolic.

•   Provide support. Often marketplace conditions, or the people getting laid off aren’t at fault. It can be the by-product of misguided policies from top management. There is a logic to providing services such as job counseling, résumé writing assistance, and job search help. There are firms that specialize in helping employees during “transitions.”

It’s Never Over

Leaders confront their own challenges during layoffs. Survivors of a downsizing typically harbor two questions: “Is it over?” and “Am I next?” Understandably, the instinct of leaders is to reassure. Leaders should resist this temptation. Leaders should tell the truth, even if the hard truth is not what survivors want to hear. “It is never over,” says David Noer in Healing the Wounds. “This is as close to a law as anything I have found in the study of layoffs. The forces of the economy, the dynamics of technology, and the reality of the new employment contract make any kind of long-range employment promise an illusion.”

Rather than avoid the virtual watercooler, managers should be visible, accessible, and forthright. Some language that we find appropriate for this situation includes: “We hope and expect that it’s over. We’ll do everything possible to avoid a repeat episode. But to promise otherwise risks conveying long-term false hope. Our priority now is to commit ourselves to a productive and successful future.”

A Role Model for Layoffs

One of the best ways to learn about separation decencies is to examine how other companies have approached layoffs. Some stories serve as role models; others give us warnings. One of the better-managed downsizings of the past few years was undertaken in 2001 by Agilent, an $8.3 billion spin-off of Hewlett-Packard. The company was faced with an economic downturn that hit the telecom industry especially hard. Agilent had inherited much of the full employment culture of Hewlett-Packard, an organization that had never had a layoff. This heritage made what Agilent had to do especially difficult. After postponing the inevitable by belt-tightening, slashing expenses, and even getting employees to accept a temporary 10 percent, across-the-board salary cut, Agilent was forced to eliminate 4,000 jobs—9 percent of the company. But chairman emeritus Ned Barnholt laid out three ground rules:

1.   Employees were to be notified only by their direct managers.

2.   Managers would be clear and honest.

3.   Layoff decisions were to be based on published criteria.

Barnholt understood that the downsizing campaign had to be two parts communication to one part implementation. On August 20, 2001, the day Agilent would report a quarterly loss of $219 million—its first loss ever—Barnholt got on the public address system for the first time, according to a report in Fortune, to tell employees about the loss before telling Wall Street.¹ Tradition was to be broken that day, and another tradition was to be created. Barnholt insisted on making the announcement to employees himself so they wouldn’t have to hear about it from the media. He presented the deteriorating state of the business, recognized the sacrifices employees had already made, and detailed how many people would lose their jobs, where the number came from, and how the admittedly painful process would work.

This direct personal announcement was a decency that started the process on the right foot. Going forward, Agilent made the process as transparent as possible, demonstrating another separation decency: The forms managers were to use in making selections were posted on Agilent’s intranet. Employees could see the criteria used as the basis for the selection decisions. Agilent considered the layoff regrettable but nothing to be ashamed about. Rarely has such a large organization been as public with a layoff as was Agilent.

The second round of communications was to come from the managers actually making the difficult decisions. Barnholt sent more than 3,000 managers through a series of daylong training exercises, where they role-played and practiced the right and wrong ways to separate people. Managers were expected to be as honest as possible. The company wanted a maximum of fairness and a minimum of ambiguity in the process and, by all accounts, it succeeded. Many of the employees Agilent separated wrote Barnholt that they were satisfied with the fairness and decency, if not the outcome, of the process.

Preparation, Preparation, Preparation

Separating an employee is too sensitive a situation to be handled without extensive advance planning. The entire episode, whether large or small scale, needs to be choreographed thoughtfully. This is not a time for a manager to be spontaneous. Managers do best when they receive separation training like that used at Agilent in the days immediately before the event. In these training sessions, managers learn what not to say, what to say, and how to say it. Managers are taught how to respond to an employee’s emotional expressions, which can be intense. In essence, the training helps the manager behave decently even when the employee, understandably, may not.

No downsizing is perfect. There is often an inadvertent misstep, especially with large-scale workforce reductions, no matter how well planned. If there are 50 things that can go wrong in any downsizing and you think of 25 of them, you’re a genius. But the one you miss can be devastating. That’s why we are obliged to try to eliminate every opportunity for unnecessary missteps even though it is very difficult. Here are just a few examples of the avoidable mistakes.

Some years ago an enterprise with factories and branch offices throughout the United States was planning a major downsizing. The downsizing impacted thousands of workers in dozens of states across the country. The company, headquartered in an eastern state, did meticulous planning to have resources in place for those employees to be separated as well as for surviving employees when the downsizing announcement was made at 10 a.m. Unfortunately, the planners forgot that when it’s 10 a.m. in Eastern Standard Time, it’s 7 a.m. in Pacific Standard Time. Employees in the western states heard the news before they came to work and hours before the branch offices were ready. Confusion and hard feelings could have been avoided.

In another case, we thought we had sufficiently trained and coached the terminating manager about how to break the news that an employee was losing his job. But when the time came, the terminating manager couldn’t quite bring himself to utter the appropriate words clearly enough. He obviously failed to deliver the message because the individual who was to be separated returned to the job the following morning! There is a natural human tendency to avoid confrontation, so it’s understandable that we pull back from using direct language. That’s why training and coaching are imperative.

In a third case, news of the upcoming layoff leaked out. This can be a real problem for an organization. If individuals learn of their upcoming separation through the newspaper, they are likely to have bitter feelings and may not even show up for their termination meetings. If local reporters get the story only from the voices of the separated employees, the company looks unprofessional and needs to do hurry-up damage control.

Avoid Creating the Most Obvious Pain and Suffering

Failing to be thoughtful about the day selected for the separation creates another set of avoidable mistakes. All it takes is a phone call to avoid separating an employee:

•   On his or her birthday, especially before a milestone birthday (e.g., the day before the employee’s fiftieth birthday)

•   On a significant date such as the day before his or her pension plan vests

•   On a religious holiday (e.g., Christmas, Easter, Yom Kippur, Ramadan)

•   When the separation documents are not in order

•   When a company activity could interfere with the scheduled event (e.g., “Bring Your Kid to Work Day”)

3M, the company that developed Post-it Notes, has been celebrated for its innovative brand. When business realities made it necessary for 3M to cut 2,000 employees around the world, the company proceeded thoughtfully with a view toward reassuring its remaining employees. Remaining employees want to know their colleagues are taken care of. Managers need to assure the remaining staff that the separating employees are valued and that the organization is supporting them in the transition. Managers need to remain highly visible in the few months following a layoff. Closed door meetings invite speculation.

David Noer, author of Healing the Wounds, tells the story of a major company that embarked on a downsizing that resulted from a downturn in the company’s fortunes. On the day of the downsizing, management neglected to check on something that unnecessarily rubbed salt into already open wounds. As the separated employees were leaving the building carrying boxes of their belongings, they saw contracted landscape specialists at work redesigning the corporate lawn. The separated employees had just been told that economic belt-tightening required their separation. Imagine the resentment on the part of the departing employees as they saw hundreds of thousands of dollars being spent on the corporate grounds. This situation could easily have been avoided.

An employee being separated is always a bad day for that employee. Some days and times are better than others. Fridays are ill-advised for a number of reasons. If corporate help such as outplacement is offered, it is usually not available on weekends. The employee separated on Friday has all weekend to stew without professional support. Experience shows that some employees separated on Fridays make tactical mistakes, such as panicking and firing off ill-considered e-mails or résumés. Sometimes family dynamics suffer when separated employees have too little support and too much time on their hands.

Avoid Mondays for a little-understood reason. Timing the notification on a Monday means that the managers have two days to forget the briefings they presumably received the prior week. Give a difficult process every chance to work. All things considered, the optimum days for separating employees are Tuesdays, Wednesdays, or Thursdays.

Where the conversation takes place is also important. The terminating manager’s office may seem natural, but it presents a number of problems. First, if the employee being terminated gets visibly agitated or needs some time for composure, there is no place for the employee to regroup. For the manager to leave his or her own office so the separated employee can regain his or her composure is not practical or helpful.

Forcing a shaken and embarrassed employee to walk the gauntlet past coworkers is ill-advised on a number of levels. If the separated employee’s coworkers do not know what happened, they may make an embarrassing mistake, such as engaging the person in a work conversation. If they do know, the hallway passing of the separated employee will be as uncomfortable for them as for the individual. In general, it’s best to give the news in the separated employee’s office or a vacant office. These locations also make it convenient for outplacement consultants or other supportive individuals to join the employee immediately after the notification.

Firing an employee in the company parking lot can make for a long-lasting bitter taste. Similarly, severing an employment relationship at a bar or restaurant will have a counterproductive effect. Both are too public, and neither provides the environment for the notifying manager to behave with decency and sensitivity.

Thoughtful companies also consider the employee’s logistical issues, such as transportation. Many companies encourage carpooling. But if the employee to be separated is a member of a carpool, there are two issues that must be considered. First, will the employee want to ride with others on this difficult day? Second, if the employee is expecting to ride with the carpool at the end of the day, there’s a big issue if the separation occurs early in the day. The employee may be stuck. Likewise, if the separation notification happens minutes before the on-site childcare center closes, the separated employee may be rushed to pick up a child. The most decent approach is to assign someone—a person from HR or an outplacement consultant—to help resolve logistical issues for that day. This person should check in with the employee as soon as he or she has gained composure to eliminate as much logistical stress as possible.

We encourage our readers to overestimate the amount of choreography that has to go into a well-planned, sensitive, and decent separation notification. Decency begins with training the managers. It involves selecting the right time and place for the notifications and having the right support systems in place immediately after the notifications. Decency also calls for support of the notification managers throughout their difficult day. While some companies have the staff and skills to attend to all these details themselves, an increasing number of companies turn to career management companies to handle the planning and immediate ramifications of notifications. Company managers have to notify the employees personally. But career management companies can be choreographers to help them put the pieces together with effectiveness and civility.

The Failure to Coordinate

One way to emphasize the need for planning is to show what can happen when important decency details are not considered in advance. The following is illustrative: Walmart, the largest company in the United States, also owns Sam’s Club. On the same day in 2018 that Walmart proudly announced it was raising the minimum wage of its workers, awarding bonuses, and increasing maternity and paternity leave benefits, Sam’s Club closed 53 stores with no announcement. Sam’s Club employees showed up to open stores only to find that the doors were barred shut.

Analysts speculated that Sam’s Club executives hoped they could avoid the bad news by “burying” the store closings on a day when the media would be focused on the good news from parent company Walmart. If so, they were sadly mistaken. Analysts were scathing in their reaction. “Sam’s Club is trying to pull the wool over people’s eyes,” said Ed Zitron, founder of the media relations company EZPR. “They just made a rapid miscalculation.”²

The lesson here is that in today’s interconnected world, you should always assume that layoffs will go public about two minutes after the first person learns of it. The decision to keep employees in the dark resulted in hundreds of angry workers who turned to Facebook and Twitter to report their dilemma in real time. Traditional media love conflict, so they quickly picked up on the story. Many Sam’s Club workers learned of this development from Facebook and Twitter before they heard it from their managers. What effect do you think this sequence had on employee engagement and loyalty?

Walmart leadership, by their own hand, missed the opportunity to have coordinated the events, to have statements ready to go, and to release them to the media simultaneously with the first notifications. And those notifications should have taken place personally.

The Decent Notification

The conversation between a manager and person being separated is the most critical element of the separation event. Two core management decencies are associated with this conversation:

•   Take time with the employee. A short, rushed, or interrupted meeting is salt in the wound.

•   Listen to the employee with empathy and with judicious response. If you’re anxious or defensive, it may be even harder to remain silent while the employee talks. It’s impossible to listen and talk at the same time.

If the employee is critical of the company, you should avoid debating the issue. Listening is different than agreeing.

You can forget a performance review when separating an employee; in fact, there could be consequences to relating a layoff to performance, however indirectly. Skip the reflective philosophical conversations and platitudes such as, “I know how you must feel,” or “This is as difficult for me as it is for you.” Rather, a brief conversation, to the point, delivered courteously and succinctly, will communicate the reality of the decision that is irrevocable. If confirmation of the employee’s severance entitlements is delivered in writing at the same time, it avoids the potential for misunderstanding.

Separation Language

What words apply to individuals who are let go? The choice of words can reflect a company’s attitude. An organization that talks about “terminees” or “rightsized employees” is likely to send a different message than one that uses words such as “former colleagues” or “separated employees.” When someone at W. L. Gore & Associates quits or is let go, the company refers to it as a separation. “This word acknowledges that a mind and a heart are leaving the organization, and it speaks to the relationship side of the separation instead of only to the procedure,” write Scott Cawood and Rita Bailey in Destination Profit. The separation of an employee can best be experienced as part of an organization’s reputation bank account. Sometimes there are deposits, and sometimes there are withdrawals. Each separation should be treated directly, with candor, honesty, and sensitivity.

In any case, the objective should be less about finding the perfect euphemism and more about avoiding expressions that stray from the truth. Euphemisms are likely to backfire. Here are a few most of us are familiar with:

•   Downsized

•   Made redundant

•   Streamlined

•   Rightsized

•   Asked to resign

•   Coerced transition

•   Decruited

•   Dehired

•   Force reduction

•   Involuntary separation

•   Released

What all these terms have in common is an attempt to avoid the reality that a business unilaterally terminated a worker’s employment.

The reference statement should be carefully thought through. This is the language that the ex-employer will release to parties considering hiring the separated employee. It is almost always in everyone’s interest to negotiate the content of this statement. Barring criminal activity, egregious behavior, or actions that will clearly involve further legal activity or bad publicity, the former company’s position is that it would like to see the separated employee reemployed as quickly as possible. The former employee, of course, would usually like to be reemployed as quickly as possible. The reference statement should not be an obstacle to this shared interest. The content of the separation statement should be negotiated as generously as the facts permit. Human resources and former managers should be trained to release the separation statement without further comment or embellishment.

Tell the Truth

Telling the truth requires two separate commitments. First is the commitment to accept the truth for oneself. Second is the commitment to tell the truth to others. The first commitment is often the hardest.

Whether speaking with those being separated or those being retained, managers must be truthful, even when either party would prefer to say something else. While it might be tempting to tell a separated employee that there may be another job for him or her in a few months, that’s rarely the truth and will only heighten expectations and discourage people from finding new work quickly. Retained employees want a commitment that they will not be next, but it is dangerous to make such promises. No matter how much it seems to hurt in the short term, in the long run it is always less painful to have heard the truth up front.

Using facts is a helpful way to deliver the truth. This may not always be convenient. Sometimes the facts are unpalatable. Nevertheless, both separated and retained employees are better off in an authentic relationship where all parties embrace the facts. Everyone, whether separated or still employed, needs to take individual responsibility for his or her job security and career destiny. It’s impossible to do so without candid, fact-based conversations.

To summarize, the minimum requirements for decency in employee separation include the following five values:

1.   A fair and preferably transparent selection process. This means objective, easily understood standards available for everyone to read.

2.   Sensitive, in-person coaching of the terminating manager.

3.   Sensitivity to the logistics of the notification process.

4.   Clarity around exactly what the company will tell potential employers. This reference statement should be in writing so both parties are in sync.

5.   Management accessibility to surviving employees.

Redeployment

Very simply, redeployment in the business context can be defined as the transfer of an employee to another position within the same organization.

This internal job transfer process is sometimes considered when there is a planned reduction in force and where the employer views redeployment as culture enhancing and affordable. Ours is a book on decency, civility, and respect in a business context. Our insights and observations on institutional redeployment relate to the process as a potentially value-added, culture-enrichment, and reputation-enhancing activity.

Among the success factors of redeployment are these:

•   A moral commitment by leadership to invest in retaining as many employees as possible during a business downturn

•   A policy and process steering committee composed of HR, IT, Finance, and Operations

•   A commitment to “walking before running”—a pilot program accompanied by clear expectation setting and forthright communication

•   An earnest commitment to job-transfer, onboarding, and, where necessary, retraining

•   An up-to-date talent and skills inventory

•   A commitment to eliminate or minimize talent hoarding by managers

•   A directive requiring that internally displaced employees be prioritized over external candidates for rehiring

Leadership’s commitment to a workforce redeployment strategy conveys two important messages: talent is a precious, limited resource, and it’s less than moral or prudent to turn a blind eye to talent disposability. Inevitably, a redeployment policy will highlight a familiar ambivalence among line managers who want to move quickly in response to sudden changes in business conditions. Most companies in the United States have yet to consider redeployment in a scalable, holistic manner.

Separation Makes Memories

Saying goodbye is sometimes a business reality. The decencies associated with the details of how we say goodbye become an important component of a corporate culture. When we separate people, we are making memories: memories for those separated and memories for the cultures that will survive them. A clear testimony to a culture of trust is how a company separates valued people. “We hate to see you go. Give us your cell phone and keys to the company car. Security will escort you out!” These sentences sometimes need to be said. Of course, companies need to protect their assets. But it is neither decent nor prudent to use sloppy language during a separation episode.

The company should certainly protect itself by canceling passwords and retrieving keys, ID cards, cell phones, pagers, and so forth. But these steps need to be choreographed thoughtfully and in proportion to the situation. When an employee is fired for cause, such as embezzlement or harassment, it is entirely prudent for the company to block his or her access to networks and escort the employee off the premises. Any employee who has broken faith with the company cannot expect anything less. But if it’s a no-fault separation where there is no issue surrounding the employee’s performance or integrity, then decency calls for a different set of actions. In these cases, anything that questions the employee’s performance or integrity can and should be avoided.

In all cases, security personnel should remain in the background unless the employee has demonstrated a lack of integrity or a propensity for acting out. If you have regard for the employee you are about to separate, ask yourself this question: “Would I rehire this person if I could?” If the answer is yes, then the risk is worth taking. Let such people gather their personal possessions in dignity and in private. Is there a risk here? Sure. Behaving well is no guarantee that someone else will not behave badly. But it’s the way to go.