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Imagine to wake up one morning and lie in bed, to check your overnight -time emails before you have to make a job call to France if you see a message from the managing director of your company.
It is said that many people are released. The next e -mail is worse: you will be one of you.
They sit in bed, cardiac racing and grab their laptop to register with the company network. Your password no longer works. It is time to make the call to France, but you cannot remember the name of the man you should call, or his number. It was all in an e -mail that you can no longer access.
You write a favorite manager whose number is grateful on your phone. He writes back to say that he was also released. He found it after trying to get to the office and discover that his badge did not work.
After all, they get up and think about the dark weeks that their lives should go to.
Vivek Gulati doesn’t have to imagine anything. It is almost exactly what happened to him when he is one of the 12,000 workers Google rejected a dark time of the layoffs of the tech sector in early 2023.
The 47-year-old software engineer later wrote about his experiences in a Harvard Business Review Article This presented the shock of learning that they lost their job by e -mail.
I tracked him down this week after new US monthly data rose by almost 200,000 in April. Separated a Opinion poll suggested that remote, impersonal job cuts, which were an inevitable feature of Pandemic closures.
In the past two years, up to 57 percent of US workers have been released, the messages by e -mail or telephone, as the Zety Careers -Site survey has determined. Only 30 percent learned face to face.
The rest heard on a video call or the office wine vine, with the exception of an unfortunate 2 percent who only found that they were not registered in their work -e mail or a messaging system like Slack.
This undoubtedly happened before pandemic. In both cases, it surprised Gulati, who is now again as a contractor on Google and not as a full -time employee.
As a tech veteran, he has already passed through and has no time for the idea that e -mails could be the only way to fire thousands of people.
Anyone who has ended has a manager who could deliver the news and could offer personalized help, which is both true and important.
When he lost his job at the US Tech Group, Broadcom almost a decade ago, a vice president called to say that an acquisition had made the move inevitable, but he wanted to help. He offered to present Gulati to another company that he believed that she would like to hire him.
“To date, I have a lot of respect for this VP and the entire team with which I have worked with,” says Gulati.
This is understandable, as is the effects on people who keep their work after mass shots, but live in so much fear of the next round that they make working life sharper and less collaborative.
This is only one reason why it is in the interest of an employer to make at least a call about discharge, although this is not ideal. There is no way to know what the person can do with at that moment.
Even if you are not on the bed of a dying parent or get into a funeral, you can easily lie in a place of privacy such as the hairdresser. Here was a popular Australian TV news anchor named Sharyn Ghidella last year when she got a call to say that, afterwards 17 years Her time had expired in the network. It was later, she said, “not quite the chopping I hoped for”. Their stormed fans accused the network of cowardice and rudeness.
People are sometimes necessary. I did it myself, although hopefully it never has to do it again. However, there is no apology to make a brutal moment worse by presenting the news without personal human contact, especially in a large, well -equipped company. The earlier this unnecessarily cruel spot ends in corporate lives, the better.
pilita.clark@ft.com
