Twitter’s Layoffs Are The Perfect Example Of How Not To Fire People

(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- There may not be a good way to fire people. But there absolutely is a bad way. In fact, several bad ways. And Twitter Inc.’s self-appointed chief twit, Elon Musk, seems to have hit on most of them. Some employees were laid off by email. Others found they’d been locked out of their work laptops and messaging channels before they even had official word of their dismissal.

There was no mention by Musk of the most important reason the firings were necessary—namely that he needs to find some $1.2 billion to pay the interest on the debt he raised to fund the deal. Worse: He’s repeatedly seemed to blame employees for the company’s problems.

In , a 2014 broad how-to guide for startup founders, venture capitalist Ben Horowitz outlines five steps to do layoffs properly: Get your head right; don’t delay; be clear in your own mind why you’re firing people; train your managers; and address the whole company.

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Camilla Boyer, director of executive communications at payments processor Checkout.com, condenses the advice to three concepts: accountability, empathy and closure. She says she not only had the misfortune of working at three companies inside the past year to have carried out mass firings, but also had to help executives communicate the decisions.

“Accountability, that means having a leader who is willing to own their mistakes,” she says. “We don’t expect leaders to be perfect, but we expect them to have the humility to admit that they are fallible, and that goes a long way to retaining the trust of the remaining team.”

Empathy often comes down to giving your employees a generous severance package. The decision by Meta Platforms Inc. Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg to fire 11,000 employees may seem brutal as he continues to spend billions of dollars on his metaverse plans, but he’s giving them at least 16 weeks of pay and six months of health-care coverage, and they’ll still receive their 2022 bonuses.

Finally, “closure is a really important one that companies often underestimate,” says Boyer. “It means giving both sides—those who are leaving and staying—the chance to say goodbye.” That could mean letting them retain access to work email and message channels for a few hours, even as sensitive information is restricted.

For Boyer, the absolute no-go is firing people en masse over email, as Musk did, or video call, as happened with online mortgage platform Better.com, which let 900 employees go via Zoom call last year. That’s because, while those losing their jobs bear the brunt, managers also need to think about how it will affect the morale of other employees.

The technology industry, after years of outsize growth, is now cutting back, and thousands of workers are losing their jobs. As executives’ sky-high ambitions fall back to earth, the least they can do is cushion the landing for the victims of their failures.

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