This might sound wild, but maybe the decent thing to do is if the company warns the team months in advance that a purge is coming. Let those who need to leave, leave. Quietly tell those who you really want to remain that they should not fear.
Imagine a world where the company had offered them the opportunity to quit with a buy out package, probably quite a bit healthier of a situation for all involved given this person's abysmal morale in their current role.
I see the "get paid to quit" trend from time to time and I think it's a great idea.
The people left have to worry both about the layoffs and also need to work harder. Its a bad situation but at least the people laid off can move on.
Letting people who are likely angry having access to company resources and financials being able to make real damages to Stripe's customers.
Companies want to keep high performers. Voluntary layoffs is a very dumb move.
In the case of layoff, the company wouldn't be benefit at all if low performers stay and high performers leave. Actually the company might collapse.
> The whole "the employee can cause damage to the company" view is ridiculous – guess what, the employee can already do damage to the company while employed there, yet they don't.
Yeah, because they don't know they will be fired. They aren't angry employees.
Laid off employees are angry.
Let's talk about being obtuse.
Here in the UK an employer has to inform the government and go through a mandatory redundancy process when laying off more than a given number of employees (I think it's 100 off the top of my head). At my last role I was put at risk of redundancy and went through the process. One of the first steps of that process was offering voluntary redundancy which had a higher redundancy package than if you received compulsory redundancy.
If someone was considering leaving, or was close to retirement leaving voluntarily gave them the opportunity to leave early and with a nice payout. Or if you had skills high in demand it gave you the opportunity to get a lump sum and walk into a new job.
This significantly reduced the need for the company to make compulsory redundancies.
It is a bad idea for the company to do voluntary layoff.
Your point focuses entirely on what is good for employees, which is unrealistic. Companies do what is good for themselves, not employees. Sometimes they overlap, but sometimes they don't.
You basically have a bunch of employees who know their job is going to end...waiting for it to end. Mentally, you're checked out. You're not going to produce your best work for your company and it becomes a struggle to stay engaged. That's my experience, anyway.
The better approach for everyone is to _maybe_ give 1-2 weeks warning so everyone can wrap up what they're working on, then give fair severance packages when the day comes.