Companies can't do layoffs right because they're trying to act like 'cool parents'

• The pandemic was supposed to have ushered in an era of empathetic leadership.
• But as the pandemic fades and a recession looms, employers are back to their old ways.
• This includes cutting their workforces — often haphazardly and sometimes without much compassion.

Let's start with this: There's no good way to do layoffs.

Stripping people from their livelihoods is the most consequential action a company can take — and an inherently painful one, at that.

While there might not be a good way to let employees go, there are a lot of bad ways to do it. And lately, we've had plenty of examples.

Some, such as Google, have conducted layoffs by email. There've been double-dip cuts at Amazon and Meta. Disney is doing several rounds, dragging out job losses over a span of months. McDonald's shut its offices, and employees got their pink slips at home.

The pandemic was supposed to have ushered in an age of empathetic leadership. And for a while there, it did. Many companies made employee mental health a priority at the start of the health crisis, instructing managers to do whatever necessary to help shell-shocked employees cope. Workers, especially younger ones, grew accustomed to this warmer, gentler management style, and amid a tight labor market, it became an expectation. 

But the harshness of recent layoffs suggests that any managerial empathy workers gained during the depths of the pandemic was short-lived. 

"We've come out of this season of, 'We're all in this together,' and, 'Let's talk about psychological safety,'" Muriel Maignan Wilkins, a cofounder of Paravis Partners, a C-suite-advisory company, told Insider. 

Now all bets are off. The cold and impersonal nature of these layoffs, combined with the sheer numbers of employees being cut, has sent workers reeling, she said, adding: "The need for empathy wasn't just a flash in the pan."

Being a compassionate leader doesn't mean you fix things

There's long been "an employee desire to be treated as human, and the pandemic highlighted it even more," Wilkins said.

Today, as the pandemic fades and a recession looms, employers are back to their old ways — reacting to market conditions, sometimes haphazardly and sometimes without much compassion. 

"Being a compassionate leader doesn't mean you fix things but that you bear witness to people's suffering," Wilkins said. "If you're treating a layoff as an arm's length transaction — an email, not a conversation — you're not acknowledging what the other person is experiencing."

Alison Taylor, a clinical associate professor at New York University's Stern School of Business, told Insider that companies' poorly managed layoffs pointed to a broader decline in good leadership. Managers need to be empathetic, she said, but they must also provide workers with guidance and direction and not shield them from economic realities. 

"Managers don't know how to respond to the new focus on mental health while simultaneously helping employees understand that their jobs ride on personal and company performance," Taylor said.

This approach has come to haunt managers as the economy softens, she said. That's why it's understandable that workers are angry about the way layoffs have been handled, Taylor added.

"The message coming from on high was that, 'We'll take care of you no matter what,' as if performance doesn't matter," she said.

"Young people are not familiar with these conditions," she added. "We've had a long stretch of growth, and now that's changing. We are in a different era now."

Workers as expendable commodities

There are, of course, logistical hurdles that make mass layoffs challenging to execute.

"If you're laying off 50 people, you can have one-on-one conversations, but if you're laying off 10,000, that's harder," Francine Gordon, a lecturer of management at Santa Clara University's Leavey School of Business, told Insider.

Amazon's two rounds of layoffs totaled 27,000; Meta's totaled 21,000.

Gordon, who previously worked in human resources, said layoffs "take a lot of effort to get everything in place" and it appeared that some companies failed to plan properly. This might be because many had never had to conduct layoffs at this scale. 

The layoffs at Meta, for example, were the company's first major job cuts since it launched in 2004.

Still, there's no excuse for some things, she said. "Finding out you've lost your job by email? That's just sad," Gordon said.

"And companies wonder why employees are no longer loyal," she added. "Well, it's a two-way street — when you treat people like expendable commodities, it's hard to feel loyal."