Brave New Work 152. Making Layoffs More Human
Aaron Dignan and Rodney Evans explore whether layoffs always have to be the worst, and what a people-positive design might look like.
At Work with The Ready · Rodney Evans and Sam Spurlin
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Show Notes
We won’t mince words: Layoffs suck. They heap very real stress and chaos onto very real people’s lives. And as we’ve seen reported lately, big waves of layoffs are hitting several companies—and thousands of people—hard right now. This pile of not-good news sparked some questions for us, like: Why are layoffs a go-to cost-cutting lever? What pre-layoff org design decisions put employers and employees in this gnarly position? And why does every CEO letter announcing mass layoffs sound like it was written by the same robot?
In today’s episode of Brave New Work, Aaron Dignan and Rodney Evans, who’ve been on both sides of the layoff aisle, spend time with these queries and dig into:
- The all-around messiness of the traditional layoff process
- Why companies default to short-term thinking when the boom times boom
- Dehumanizing layoff practices we should shelve for good
- Creating clear containers and agreements for handling layoffs
- How we could design a layoff moment that’s truly people-positive
Mentioned references:
- "RIFs"
- ConvertKit episode: BNW Ep. 36 with Nathan Barry
- "life stress inventories": Holmes and Rahe stress scale
- Office Space, 1999 movie
- Up in the Air, 2009 movie
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