How Not to Botch a Layoff
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Tomorrow at 4:00am local time, spread across three batches of emails, some 8,000 Meta employees will find out they’ve been laid off — the latest in a string of (allegedly) AI-induced layoffs, from Block to Coinbase to Bill.com.
Layoffs suck; there’s no two ways around it. But there are still better and worse ways to do them.
Having been involved in communicating layoffs in my in-house days, including a 20% downsizing at Epic Games in 2023, here are a few lessons I’m sharing in the hopes of making a shitty event marginally less shitty.
Just Do It
Meta announced the move in an internal memo in mid-April, as Bloomberg reported — leading to what was almost certainly a wildly unproductive month for the business and several exposés on what “it’s really like at Meta” right now.
Don’t do that! Don’t announce it’s happening. Don’t give people a heads-up. From the moment employees know layoffs are coming, assume productivity will drop to, like, 5% of what it normally is. Maybe less.
That’s why you have to keep the information to an extremely small group of people — meaning, only those involved in making or communicating the layoff. This runs counter to the way good executives run basically everything else: Good executives root out disagreement and surface funkiness so it can be addressed and dispelled. Not here! Very trusted, pretty senior people will need to be excluded from this process, and astute employees will start sniffing around, and honestly the vibes will get kind of weird.
Still: Don’t tell anyone not in the working group.
To be clear, keeping this secret sucks. That’s why it’s important to move quickly on this decision.
A very small group of people should come to the decision this needs to happen and a rough number for the reduction. I’m talking, you can count them on one hand — think, the CEO and the heads of people, ops, and finance. Then fold in comms and anyone absolutely essential to making decisions about who stays and who goes.
Be judicious: Every additional person you fold in is a leak risk, and every leak risk is (minimally) a productivity risk and (maximally) a reputational one.
Cut to the Bone
It’s tempting to take a light touch here. Layoffs have a real human impact, so if you can minimize it, shouldn’t you? At the risk of being callous: No. Cut more than you think you need to, and give yourself much more runway than you think you need. Cut to the bone, and then cut some more. Be absolutely ruthless.
Layoffs are a moment to rethink every aspect of how your business runs. The question should not be: Can we reduce the Product Comms team from eight people to two? but Do we even need a Product Comms team at all?
The reason for this is that one layoff is survivable. Every business has a bump; indeed, bumps are an essential part of lore. But rolling layoffs — even if they’re spread over a few years — create a sense of constant turmoil. A company is a social contract: Bet on us and we’ll bet on you. Every layoff is a rip to that contract, a moment for employees to stop thinking of themselves as characters in your story and as characters in their own. Don’t make them doubt the quest.
Yes, the two points above are about operations, not communications. That’s because (1) good communicators are great operators (which is why CCOs are the next COOs) and (2) bad operations becomes a communications problem.
Just Say It
So you’ve decided to do layoffs. Don’t beat around the bush. People want information, not platitudes.
Good layoff communications are:
Global. Sometimes companies only communicate with those being laid off. This only creates confusion for those remaining, who don’t know if the hammer has yet to drop. It can also feel unnecessarily alienating, because you’ll have cleaved your employee base in haves and haves-not without any warning. A single, global message allows all of your employees — both those being let go and those remaining — to feel like they’re part of something shared for the last time.
Tactical. Right now, the best gift you can offer your employees is clarity. How will this go down? How will they know whether or not they’ve been impacted? Is everyone on this email or Zoom being laid off, or is this a global message and there is follow up to come? Say all of that right at the top. You know how college admissions letters start with either, “We’re delighted to inform you,” or “We regret to inform you”? That’s because they know you’re going to skim the rest. Same logic applies here.
Human… Nothing conveys less empathy than copying-and-pasting another company’s layoff script. Even if your communication hits the same high-level notes that, say, Block’s did, you need to put it in your own words. It is more important that this message feels authentic to you than that the grammar is perfect; don’t let a comms person or an employment lawyer smooth out all the rough edges.
…But not emotional. Layoffs are hard for everyone involved. But let’s be real, they’re hardest for those actually laid off. Be respectful of that and don’t make it about you by getting overly emotional. If you’re writing an email, don’t talk about how hard this is for you personally. If you’re delivering your message live and can’t make it through a practice run without crying, you need to keep practicing until you can deliver it cleanly.
Phased. You should include the business reasons for your decision in your initial message. (Is this an unforced RIF to better realign the business to the opportunities ahead, or is your hand being forced by economic conditions? What should everyone remaining be laser-focused on?) You should also expect that employees will retain exactly 0% of this messaging on the day of the layoff. Schedule time the week after to reinforce what the new vision is for the business and why you’re really bullish that this is the right group to get it done.
As to whether you should post your layoff message publicly: It’s trendy for good reason. Posting gets ahead of the inevitable media story. But it means watering your message down for public consumption — which is exactly how you end up with hundreds of identical memos. It also means you’re not giving full attention to the real audience: your employees.
My preference is to have the CEO post a separate, shorter note on LinkedIn sharing the decision and ending with something like, “We’ll have more to share on our new direction soon. But today we’re focused on those being let go.” Your internal comms might still leak, but it’s less likely if you’ve already shared the substantive information publicly.
Most importantly, write your own comms. Layoff notes have become a sort of Mad Libs, with companies copy-and-pasting one another’s emails down to the word.
It doesn’t matter how good the language is; borrowed language rings hollow. The 87th time you hear “to be or not to be,” you roll your eyes. Write your own.