Books with bad endings get tossed in the garbage. Television shows with bad endings get panned on social media. Relationships with bad endings can drag us down for years. No matter how many great pages in a book, great scenes in a TV show, great moments in a relationship, each is defined by its ending.
So is it any surprise that a company’s culture is defined by how it treats employees on their way out the door? If you want to avoid an institution of fear for your current employees, you’d better properly treat the employees you’re saying goodbye to.
This is especially important to consider amid the pandemic when employees are on edge and being bombarded hourly by headlines highlighting record unemployment. You want your company to emerge from this crisis with its culture intact; it isn’t enough to financially survive if your culture is toxic and can’t help you compete for the limited business that follows economic shocks.
Many of you reading this are, unfortunately, likely facing the same tough decision my company recently faced: Whether to let people go and how to do it. I know that with constrained budgets and deep economic uncertainty, worrying about the employees you’re saying goodbye to seems like a nice-to-have instead of a must-have.
But try this thought experiment. You lay off a chunk of your workforce. Rather than give them eight or more weeks of severance, you give them just two weeks and send them on their way. You alert your remaining employees about the layoffs (as if they didn’t already know). Who will be the first people those laid-off employees call? The friends and colleagues they spent years sitting next to, learning, growing, laughing.
Your remaining employees will hear all the details. And even if they decide to stay, they’ll quickly exit the moment another job opportunity presents itself. So providing a good severance package and exit experience isn’t just the right thing to do, ethically, it’s the right thing to do for your future balance sheet.
The upsides of getting this right are many. Your remaining employees will feel more secure. You won’t get a bad reputation, and your former employees will continue to advocate for you. Unfortunately, I have laid off more than a thousand people in my nearly two-decade career, and I can’t count the number of referrals I have gotten from employees I had to lay off.
There are, of course, many ways to end the employee-employer relationship. I want to share some of the principles that helped drive the way my company recently approached laying off just over 40 employees.
• What do you think is fair? For us, fair was eight weeks of severance and eight weeks of benefits.
• What do you think employees need to succeed beyond your company? Many people struggle with how to properly position themselves in the marketplace, so consider providing them with ongoing career coaching.
• How do you respect them personally? Laying them off in person is best; never lay people off via email first (though of course following up over email is recommended). Because of social distancing guidelines, we had to lay folks off via Zoom. It wasn’t ideal, but it was the closest we could get to being face to face. We also hosted a virtual happy hour so everyone could say goodbye to each other.
• How do you define transparency? Your remaining colleagues already know their friends were laid off. But do you give them all the details about why there were layoffs and what you’re doing to help those being let go? The more you tell them and the more questions you try to answer, the better your culture will be.
Of course, nothing can take the place of avoiding layoffs altogether. But with the amount of energy you put into hiring and developing employees along their journey with you, I urge you to make sure the ending is great. It makes all the difference.
