I was laid off last week. It could have gone better

Why are companies so careless with their workers?

I’m mad as I write this essay. I started the first draft while I was at my maddest, because I didn’t want to talk myself out of writing it, because it’s important to share this experience.

Last week, along with a slew of my coworkers, I was laid off from a job I’d been recruited into six months earlier. I’m mildly OK with the news — I knew when I took the job layoffs were likely, because I’m a jaded son of a bitch who got into journalism in the wrong era. The timing is disappointing, but I’m not worried about myself (yet).

I’m mad at the injustice of it. I’m mad because of how poorly, cruelly, irresponsibly it was handled by a company that’s put its workers through layoffs before and should know better how to at least do it with compassion. Or to imagine, in the slightest, that the numbers they just cut from a spreadsheet are attached to actual humans.

We didn’t get that.

We lost our jobs and were given no information with that announcement — not only no information about why but also no information about what would happen next — and no way to follow up.

This, of course, is a combination of deliberate design and complete lack of care. The layoff protocol is designed to keep workers from communicating or retaliating against the company, and our humanity is a casualty of the process. We get as little notice as possible, the folks who aren’t “affected” aren’t notified and our channels of communication are cut off as soon as the news is delivered. It throws dozens of workers into chaos and confusion, and it offers no one to take the blame or receive feedback for the cruelty that was handed down.

For anyone who’s never been through a modern layoff, I’ve been through three now, and I want you to understand what it looks like for workers.

The inhumanity.

The humiliation.

The carelessness.

You should understand this experience because it’s happening across industries and more frequently. I’d love for you to be a little prepared and at least less devastated if it happens to you.

Or you might be responsible for laying people off or informing people of a layoff, and I’d love for you to be aware of the pitfalls and do better than most companies to care for workers in the process.

What it felt like to be laid off from my job

I sent an email to company leadership last week documenting the experience of the layoff they’d put us through. It probably won’t be read by anyone who can make a difference there, but I have the privilege of this audience, so I’ll publish my email here where someone might care.

Here’s the feedback I shared with the company that had just laid me off:

This is the third media company layoff I’ve experienced, twice cut and once survived. The layoff this week was the worst managed I’ve seen, resulting in an unnecessarily cruel experience for your workers. Some consideration for the workers’ experience could go a long way in the future toward a more compassionate RIF process.

Media workers are familiar with layoffs. Lack of communication does nothing to stem the panic these events cause. This week, my coworkers and I were met with a mysterious, last-minute meeting added to our calendars with no further information. We were left to panic and wonder among ourselves for an hour that we might be about to lose our jobs. Those on our teams who weren’t about to be laid off saw no meeting invitation and were left further in the dark about their fate and that of their coworkers.

That meeting we’d spent an hour fearing started five minutes late, leaving dozens of remote workers to sit at home alone waiting even longer for the blow we’d braced ourselves to receive.

Once we were finally let into the video call, we were met with an editor reading a prepared statement that never once said definitively that we were being terminated and made no legible explanation for the current “restructuring.” It included no information about next steps except that an email would be coming with more details. We weren’t told where to expect to receive that email or given a chance to ensure our outside contact information was up to date with the company, nor were we given a point person or contact information to reach out to if we had questions or didn’t get the follow up. There was no time given for questions in the meeting.

Instantly following the meeting, our access to the company Slack and email were cut off. As remote workers, this was our workspace and connection to our coworkers, so we were effectively booted out of the office without a chance to say goodbye. It was wildly disorienting and completely humiliating.

Following this, the email with further information we were promised didn’t arrive for three hours. That was three hours workers waited alone at home after receiving devastating news — just to learn the terms of our termination, whether we could expect severance pay and how much, whether our families would have access to continuity in our health insurance and for how long. Whatever disorganization was behind this delay is unacceptable. A company that boasts its benefits as much as this one does should be ashamed to treat its workers with such careless cruelty.

A reduction in force is an unfortunate event that’s best avoided through more careful hiring, financial planning and transparent communication, but I realize this practice is largely the norm in our industry. However, it doesn’t have to be this devastating for workers, and it should never leave anyone humiliated as this process has left the workers you cut this week. With every decision made in this process, you abdicated your responsibility to treat workers with the compassion and respect they deserve, not only as humans but also as employees who’ve dedicated months or years to providing the power that fuels the profit these decisions are made to protect.

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💡 If you want to hear more layoff experiences,

Melanie Ehrenkranz

is building a great collection and community at

Laid Off

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The bare-minimum care workers should receive during a layoff

To make this process better for future workers, here are the suggestions I asked company leadership to consider when they plan the next layoff (from that same email):

• Cut the anticipation as much as possible. An email with all of the information would be less painful than a mystery calendar invite. It would be easier to absorb the information if we hadn’t already spent an hour fostering anxiety.

• Make space for questions. Follow up the termination notice with a meeting where workers can ask about the decision, severance, benefits and next steps. This allows us some dignity and it reduces the work on HR, who I’m sure is responding to the same few questions from every frantic laid off worker this week.

• State the truth plainly. “I’m writing to let you know you’re being terminated as part of a reduction in force.” For anyone, but especially for green workers who haven’t experienced a layoff before, being told we’re “affected” by a “restructuring” or that “the company has decided to part ways” obfuscates what’s happening.

• Get to the point immediately. Similarly, don’t say anything to those anxious workers before plainly stating that they’re being terminated. It’s the only question on their mind. Any delay or chatter about the state of the company or AI in our industry or any other cushion, only serves to offer a sliver of hope that this isn’t actually a layoff meeting before the axe is finally dropped.

• Anticipate obvious questions, and answer them quickly. Whether in an email or a meeting, know that workers will immediately wonder about severance pay and health insurance coverage. Don’t assume anyone knows industry norms, understands how COBRA works or knows how to roll over their 401(k). Guide your workers through this process with the same level of care you applied to onboarding them into these confusing systems when you hired them. Anticipate their obvious needs in this difficult moment, and offer information to get ahead of questions.

• Provide a company contact person. Let workers know who to contact with questions and where to reach them. Do this immediately upon sharing the news, in case follow up emails or termination agreements don’t reach everyone.

• Care for the workers left behind, too. Don’t leave them in the dark. Bring continuing workers into a meeting of their own, and make space for their questions. They deserve to know what’s behind the decision and whether they should expect their jobs to disappear next. They’ll also want to know how their gutted teams will be expected to function after the loss.

• Allow people to say goodbye. Offer this basic human decency to the workers who’ve developed camaraderie in service to your company. You wouldn’t likely shuffle laid off workers out the back door of an office building without a chance to clear their desks and say goodbye to their coworkers; operating with a remote workforce is no excuse to eliminate this basic dignity. It might be harder; get creative.

• Offer transition assistance. The above are bare-minimum considerations to ensure you treat workers as human beings during a layoff. This last one is a way to do a little better. Enlist an HR specialist and/or job coach to help laid off workers with their next steps — resume review, job search assistance, interview prep, etc.

That’s where my letter to the company ended, but I want to add one more thing for you…

Can you prevent being laid off?

Maybe most importantly, I want you to understand how devastating this experience was — and how much better it could be handled — because, as a worker, you have the power to prevent this cruelty.

In this job, I wasn’t part of a union, and workers hadn’t made a move to organize. Startup-y companies like this dazzle workers with remote work, unlimited time off, decent pay, bonuses and trendy benefits, and everyone feels grateful to have the job. It’s hard to agitate workers into the long and seemingly-risky process of unionizing when they have no grievances.

But this is a grievance.

None of those shiny benefits are safe under at-will employment agreements.

Unions have the power to bargain for more secure employment and ensure companies can’t let you go just to straighten out their balance sheet. They have the power to bargain for alternatives to layoffs, like small pay cuts across the board, reduced benefits or other cost-cutting measures, as well as a seat at the table to prevent decisions that put the company in a precarious position in the first place.

Siloed as individuals, we’re vulnerable to these unfair, uncaring whims of the company.

It seems hard to organize when your coworkers are apparently happy with their lot. But we’re going to be seeing layoffs like this more and more. Is this enough to spur people to action? Do we all just keep weathering the trauma, picking up our pieces and finding the next uncaring employer? Or do we want to start working together for a little more job security?

I don’t know. It looks like a long and exhausting road ahead. But I’m tired of the nonsense on the road I’ve traveled so far. We need something different. Starting this conversation with you, at least, gives me a bit of hope and purpose in an otherwise very irritating moment.

To learn about forming a union in your workplace, see these resources from AFL-CIO and information from the NewsGuild of New York.

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