💚 How to navigate a layoff with empathy and respect

Hello and Happy Thursday,

In this week’s 6ish minute read, we’re diving even further into layoffs.

Back in February, we discussed how to address layoff anxiety with your team. This week, we’re breaking down what to expect if and when layoffs impact your own company.

 I won’t pretend layoffs are as rough on the teams executing them as they are on those being let go. But I assure you they’re no picnic on either side. The first time I had to execute a layoff, I was terrified for so many reasons, but especially about the impact it was going to have on individuals - the very people I’d come to know and respect. 

Further, I felt so far in over my head when it came to the execution of it all. Layoffs are the perfect storm of needing to get so much right amidst the overwhelming potential to get everything terribly wrong. I remember desperately wishing I had a step-by-step resource (written by someone I trusted) to ensure I got everything as right as possible.

I still wish we all (people ops, managers, impacted employees and beyond) had better context and expectations around how layoffs should go down.

So that’s what we’re digging into today.

Getting this right isn’t much fun to talk about, but it’s so important. So let’s take a deep breath and jump on in.

Yours through the murkiest and muddiest,

Jill

P.S. If you're not attending Transform next week, join us for a virtual hang. 

LAYOFFS SUCK. NAVIGATE WITH CARE.

No matter where you sit in your company - if you’re a people manager, a People or HR staffer, a department lead, or in the C-suite - some awareness about layoff best practices will serve you well. Hopefully you don’t need any of this, but in the event that layoffs come knocking, it’ll help to know what to expect to keep the experience (and its aftermath) as respectful, humane, and clear as possible.

Distilling expert insights and best practices, evolving schools of thought on People Ops, and the generous advice of folks who’ve been there, I compiled a list: 11 Ways To Conduct Layoffs With Empathy and Respect. It’s a longer read, which is why it lives in full on the website

.For today’s newsletter, I wanted to highlight a few tips that would be applicable to folks in the widest variety of roles and positions.

Tip 1. Be ethical in your approach to making the decision.

Before resigning to a layoff decision, it’s vital to understand it from every angle. Clarify what you hope to accomplish - for your business, vision, organizational structure, culture, and beyond. Then assess: is a layoff the right move for these outcomes? Would other solutions work equally well?

If you’re all in on the layoff, make darn sure you ask the right questions to keep equity, transparency, accountability, and planning at the forefront. Future Work Design’s excellent guide to ethical layoffs walks you through the right questions to ask at each stage in your planning - questions like:

• What assumptions haven’t we challenged yet about our organization?

• Is our goal to maintain our current culture, or to evolve it in a future state?

• How will we measure whether we meet the desired outcomes of this decision?

• Have we considered what demographics may be unfairly impacted?

• Have we been creative about leveraging talent and skill sets in other roles or departments?

• Do we have a plan for fair, sustainable redistribution of work?

• Are we aligned on how to deliver tough news and answer tough questions?

Tip 5. Prepare communication scripts and responses to common questions for whomever will conduct layoff conversations.

These are hard enough conversations to have without preparation, so make sure those conducting them have what they need to be accurate, empathetic, and unified in their delivery. Get aligned on what needs to be said, and on how individuals can respond to a variety of questions. 

Thinking through the trickiest heat-of-the-moment potential questions shows that you’ve considered the impact of this decision on individuals. Make sure every person delivering layoff news can address the following: 

• Why is my position being eliminated? 

• Why am I, specifically, being let go?

• I’m a top performer; why am I being punished?

• How did you decide who’s being eliminated?

• Who else is being laid off on our team - is it just me?

• Who’s going to handle all my work/accounts/projects?

• Am I receiving a severance package? When are my benefits ending?

• I’m pregnant/about to go on leave/supporting an ailing family member/in the midst of a disability accommodation request/etc.; how could you do this to me now?

• Will the company support me when I apply for unemployment benefits?

• How long will I have access to my email and company accounts?

• Can I reach out to my team and say goodbye?

Tip 6. Provide talking points for managers to use when connecting with remaining team members.

As you would for delivering layoff decisions, prepare talking points for managers to guide their conversations with remaining teammates. Address what can and can’t be said in response to certain questions, including where teammates can go with requests for info a manager shouldn’t provide.

 Remaining teammates will likely have wiggly questions; managers should feel confident they know how to respond when the following asks come up:

• Are we next? How do we know our jobs are safe?

• We worked so closely with [impacted individual or team] - what does this mean for the work we do?

• Who’s going to take on [departing teammate]’s work?

• If our workloads are increasing, how are our performance expectations changing?

• What kind of information can we count on you for?

• Did you know about this? Why didn’t you warn us?

• Were you part of this decision? Did you decide who would be impacted?

🚨Resource alert!🚨 Finding appropriate language for some of these questions is tricky! Not sure where to start? Borrow some from us!

Tip 11. Support your remaining team in setting and maintaining strong boundaries.

If the layoff was well planned, remaining teammates know what additional work is and isn’t expected of them. That said, let’s bear in mind what colleagues experience in the aftermath of a layoff: increased anxiety, decreased trust, and the fear that their job could be next on the chopping block. Remaining teammates can feel immense pressure to take on extra work. Pair a fuller-than-usual plate with anxiety, uncertainty, and diminished trust, and you have a recipe for burnout.

It’s up to skilled leaders and managers to over-communicate and model what’s expected of teammates, while helping to support healthy boundaries. From routinely clarifying expectations, to reiterating company mental health or wellness benefits, to taking a judicious eye to bloated meeting calendars, to even more openly modeling your own work-life boundaries, this is the time to protect your team’s holistic balance.

In closing...

No matter where you sit in your organization, a little expectation and information can help you face tough moments with steadiness and support. By understanding what best practices inform a modern, employee-centered layoff, you can better support your team in anticipating, planning, or experiencing one.

A FEW MORE RESOURCES

Ethical layoffs: We reference it above and in our full list of layoff tips on the website, because Katie Augsburger’s “A Leader’s Guide to Ethical Layoffs” is that brilliant. It contains the tips, considerations, and questions you need to approach a layoff as humanely as possible.

Shout out to IT: Coordinating hardware return for even one remote offboarding is tricky business. A remote layoff? Even more complicated. Retriever’s laptop retrieval program makes it way simpler.

THINGS I'M LOVING RIGHT NOW

Rest isn’t something you need to earn: I’m in the middle of Lois Weinblatt’s Personal Vision Accelerator program and have been gaining immense clarity on what matters most to me - including my personal values. While it’s definitely one of my more aspirational values, I’m leaning hard into the belief that “rest is a revolutionary act” and not something I need to justify prioritizing.

For those who AREN’T going to Transform…: According to LinkedIn, I’m not the only one feeling major FOMO over missing the annual Transform conference next week. For those of us who won’t be frolicking in the desert, I’m pulling together a free little virtual hangout. Sign up here to join us. 

The search is over! You know how much I love a free resource - and this one from Jessie Schofer is 🔥. It's a compilation of HR tech tools and resources broken down by category. Consider it a one-stop-shop for the latest and greatest whenever your on the search for something new!