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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Imagine waking up one morning and lying in bed, checking your overnight emails before you have to make a work call to France, when you see a message from your company’s chief executive.
It says a lot of people are going to be laid off. The next email is worse: you are going to be one of them.
You sit up in bed, heart racing and grab your laptop to log in to the company network. Your password no longer works. It’s time to make the call to France but you can’t remember the name of the man you’re supposed to be calling, or his number. It was all in an email you can no longer access.
You text a favourite manager, whose number is thankfully in your phone. He texts back to say he has been laid off too. He found out after trying to enter the office and discovering his badge didn’t work.
Eventually, you get up and contemplate the dismal weeks ahead on the path your life is about to take.
Vivek Gulati does not have to imagine any of this. It is almost exactly what happened to him when he became one of the 12,000 workers Google dismissed in early 2023 — a dismal period of tech sector lay-offs.
The 47-year-old software engineer later wrote about his experience in a Harvard Business Review article that laid bare the shock of learning you have lost your job via email.
I tracked him down this week, after new US monthly data showed lay-offs jumped by nearly 200,000 in April. Separately, a survey suggested that remote, impersonal job cuts that were an unavoidable feature of pandemic lockdowns have persisted.
As many as 57 per cent of US workers made redundant in the past two years received the news by email or phone, the Zety careers site survey found. Just 30 per cent learnt face-to-face.
The rest heard on a video call or the office grapevine, except for an unlucky 2 per cent who only realised they had been axed when they couldn’t log into their work email or a messaging system such as Slack.
This doubtless happened before the pandemic, too. Either way, it did not surprise Gulati, who is now back at Google as a contractor rather than a full-time employee.
As a tech veteran, he has been through retrenchment before, and has no time for the idea that email might be the only way to mass fire thousands of people.
Everyone terminated, he pointed out, has a manager who could deliver the news and offer personalised assistance, which is both true and important.
When he lost his job at US tech group, Broadcom, nearly a decade ago, a vice-president called to say an acquisition had made the move unavoidable but he wanted to help. He offered to introduce Gulati to another company he believed would happily hire him.
“To this day I have a lot of respect for that VP and the whole team I worked with,” says Gulati.
That is understandable, as is the impact on people who keep their jobs after mass firings but live in so much fear about the next round that they make working life more sharp-elbowed and less collaborative.
That’s just one reason why it is in an employer’s interest to at least make a phone call about a lay-off, though even that is not ideal. There is no way of knowing what the person to be dispensed with is doing at that moment.
Even if they are not at the bedside of a dying parent or heading in to a funeral, they could easily be somewhere lacking privacy, like the hairdresser. That’s where a popular Australian TV news anchor named Sharyn Ghidella was last year when she got a call to say that, after 17 years at the network, her time was up. It was, she said later, “not quite the chop I was hoping for”. Her dismayed fans accused the network of cowardice and rudeness.
Sacking people is sometimes necessary. I have done it myself, though will hopefully never have to do it again. But there is no excuse for making a brutal moment worse by delivering the news with no personalised human contact, especially at a large, well-resourced company. The sooner this needlessly cruel blot on corporate life ends, the better.