Are you going to send out hundreds of calendar invites spread across weeks for the sole purpose of being nice to people? Are affected employees expected to queue up to get their personal “you’re fired” before their access is cut?
Yes, people generally put two and two together when there was a calendar invite with their manager and HR.
We were in a European office though, so layoffs aren't American-style "escorted from the office with immediate effect".
Management and leadership is practically a lost art these days, so many organizations are just filled with managers who haven't the first fucking idea how to actually manage people.
All that said to be like: "Well how SHOULD we correctly fire 150 people?" I dunno, to me that's like saying how do I hit a tree with my car in such a way as to make sure I'm not paralyzed? Like so much has already gone wrong to bring you to where this is a pertinent question that I don't think there's really a right answer at this point, there's just gradations of bad.
Atlassian grew from 3,600 people in 2019 to 12.100 in 2024. Triple in 5 years. Some adjustments are expected. Sucks to lose your job, but you might not have it in the first place.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1276817/atlassian-number...
So, I will fully grant that my original statement doesn't really matter here; this wasn't a department that over-scaled to meet a project that didn't exist, this is in fact, the far shittier kind of layoffs: the ones that are a direct result of a company taking by all accounts a fully functioning department and taking an axe to it to improve their bottom line in 6 months, trading experienced workers who likely have relationships with their clients for soulless chatbots for their customers to now argue with.
So yes, I fully acknowledge I was wrong, and also, this is shittier than I assumed without reading. Take that how you will.
I've been through a group, but face-to-face, layoff. 150 people in that scenario would be very doable if you split that into like 3 groups.
1:1 would be even better, and I think that ought to be doable, too, yes.
If a manager has several layoffs to do, you have people waiting on pins and needles for the dreaded calendar invite over a few hours or even days.
In a layoff, it’s important to do it humanely, quickly, and let people settle down as soon as you can. It’s bad for both the laid off and the remaining employees you have a trickle layoffs happening over a longer period of time… it’s less bad if you rip the bandaid off quickly.
You want to be able to say to your team, “Hey guys, we had a layoff this morning, and everyone affected has already been notified. It’s all done at this point - everyone in this room is not affected.”
If I hear through the grapevine there’s a layoff happening this morning, and my manager schedules a surprise 1:1 with me in a few hours because he has a few of them to do, I’m going to be a wreck between now and then.
Second time was smaller (maybe 10 people) and fully remote, and I had a surprise meeting with my direct manager over video chat.
I personally don't care so much about how the message is delivered, and more about severance, but it's interesting to see how different people handle the situation differently. Makes you wonder what alternatives they considered that they decided a pre-recorded message was best.
If you want to do it all at once, for all time zones... If there's overlapping "core hours" for different time zones, or you can schedule an all-hands videoconf time, you can do it then. Or do one for the global West, and one for the global East (which will have different cultural nuances anyway, and possibly separate management structures).
It's not that different than in-office. Except, for in-office, remaining colleagues see a person boxing up their stuff and walking out with their stuff in a box, or (worse) security escorting the people off the property. And then there's usually the desk of a terminate colleague there as a visual reminder for awhile.
One in-office layoff I saw, they arranged for all the people to be laid off to have impromptu meetings with their managers, and to go to conference rooms, at the same time... and then notified everyone still at their desks to go to an all-(remaining)-hands meeting, in a different office space, where they were told of the layoffs. Most of the axed people were already gone when the others returned. It might have been good intentions, but I'm not sure that was a good move.
It's a tricky problem, whether in-office or remote. Partly because the situation isn't right. ICs are more often let go because management failed, rather than any fault of the ICs.
That is pretty much guaranteed to happen though, unless you have a system where the assumption is employment for life at all costs. Management's job is to make decisions, many decisions won't work out, and for some of those, the consequences mean some change in what roles are going to be needed. Sometimes it's a management success that means a certain role isn't needed too ("we successfully rolled out software to book business trips, so we don't need 17 travel bookers anymore").
And anyway, let's stipulate that managers should also be punished by being sacked for any big mistake: That wouldn't save ICs, since if you're, say, pivoting away from making furniture, you still don't need the furniture makers, even if you sack the "VP of Furniture" or the CEO. And it'd be stupid to appoint a new VP of Furniture over and over to keep trying to 'make furniture happen' just to save the jobs.
Often, the company actually still needs those skills for what it's doing, but it's a bean-counter move, to "appease investors". Knowing that this will put more pressure on remaining employees, and also knowing that they'll soon be hiring for the same roles.
This is another way it's not right. There's little sense of obligation to the employee.
You could gather everybody in the same room, and announce it there, but that's still not really face-to-face.
Delegating it to their direct managers is even worse. They're generally not the ones who made the decision. Even if they were the ones who submitted a list of their people they could live without, it was the higher-ups who approved the layoff en masse.
There's just not a great way to give bad news. A video sucks, but it attracts attention only because it's different from the other sucky ways people do it.
What if your balls get ripped off? Just saying...
This is just bullshit. Managers don't have to do any such thing as it may become unnecessarily confrontational. Similarly lot of people resign via email. There is no need to have "guts" to tell manager in their face.
It just stops a ton of confusion, hope, etc. It allows that discussion to focus on "Do you want the two weeks?" and "What do you want me to do with those two weeks if you want them."
Part of being a good employee is making things clear to your manager.