This layoff could have been an email. Is there a good way to lose your job as a remote worker?

Is there a good way to lay off a remote worker?

Four years after remote work became the norm for a huge section of the labour force, it appears some com‐ panies are still struggling with the etiquette of letting someone go virtually. And amid a gradually cooling labour market and mass lay‐ offs in several sectors, such as media and the tech indus‐ try, it's become a common situation to be let go online.

On Wednesday, hundreds of Bell employees were sup‐ posedly laid off in 10-minute group virtual meetings, a move the union representing them called "beyond shame‐ ful." In a news release, the union claimed that Bell's hu‐ man resources and labour manager read a notice and didn't allow anyone to unmute to ask questions.

"These members have been living in dread of a meeting invite to find out they've lost their job since Bell announced the termina‐ tion of thousands of jobs al‐ most six weeks ago," Unifor national president Lana Payne said in the release.

In a written statement to CBC News, Bell confirmed that on Wednesday it "initi‐ ated calls with groups of our unionized team members to give notice of upcoming ac‐ tions taking place, which in‐ clude both a voluntary sepa‐ ration program and surplus reductions," adding that they've always been trans‐ parent with how the meet‐ ings would take place.

The spokesperson added that employees who were in‐ formed that they were being let go also had individual meetings with an HR repre‐ sentative to discuss their in‐ dividual packages and to ask questions - after the initial group meetings.

"Most of the employees are remote workers as en‐ shrined in their collective bargaining agreement, and therefore all of these discus‐ sions are being handled re‐ motely so that they are not called into an office."

While this example of vir‐ tual group layoffs is making headlines, Bell is far from the first.

It's "incredibly unprofes‐ sional," said Allison Venditti, a human resources expert in Toronto who is also the founder of advocacy group Moms at Work, Canada's largest organization for work‐ ing mothers.

"This isn't normal and it shouldn't be," Venditti said. "We're losing the human in human resources."

Legally, as long as it's fol‐ lowed up by a notification in writing, there's nothing stop‐ ping employers from termi‐ nating people virtually, even in mass meetings, said An‐ drew Monkhouse, managing partner at Toronto employ‐ ment law firm Monkhouse

Law and an adjunct profes‐ sor at York University's Os‐ goode Hall Law School in Toronto.

WATCH | 'Home fever' affects remote workers:

"But from a human re‐ sources, human being per‐ spective, terminating people in unorthodox ways or im‐ personal ways, like a ... mass zoom call, is very much sub‐ optimal, and it doesn't come across as being polite or rea‐ sonable to the employee that's being let go," Monkhouse told CBC News.

A short history of in‐ famous layoffs

About 20 per cent of Canadians still work most of their hours from home, Sta‐ tistics Canada reported in January. While that's a drop from 40 per cent in 2020, it's still much higher than prepandemic level of seven per cent.

And it's not a trend that seems to be going away. A 2023 paper from the U.S. Na‐ tional Bureau of Economic Research found that job postings saying employees could work remotely one day or more a week increased five-fold in Canada from 2019 to 2023.

The researchers found that remote work is more common in jobs with higher levels of computer use, high‐ er earnings and that require higher levels of education, according to an analysis by the World Economic Forum.

And with remote work, in‐ evitably, comes remote layof‐ fs. Although some are worse than others.

Infamous examples in‐ clude used car retailer Car‐ vana reportedly disconnect‐ ing employees from work ap‐ ps like Slack in 2022 before sending out an invitation to a Zoom meeting where work‐ ers found out whether they'd been cut. Thousands of em‐ ployees at tech companies Meta and Twitter learned of confirmation of their layoffs in emails in 2022.

A few months before that, hundreds of U.K. ferry work‐ ers were fired via Zoom call.

In 2021, Better.com's CEO laid off 900 employees in a Zoom webinar just before the holidays. That same year, HuffPost Canada employees found themselves out of work after being invited to a group Zoom meeting with the password "Spring is here." (Full disclosure: I was one of the affected employ‐ ees.)

On TikTok, Generation Z has been posting videos of their virtual layoffs in every industry, from tech to service to teaching. Some of the pop‐ ular "get laid off with me" videos are real recordings of the virtual meetings where the axe drops, while others are reenactments. Some even involve people putting on makeup (a popular "get

ready with me" video style on the platform) while prepping for what they know is com‐ ing.

In one nine-minute video with 2.4 millions views since it was posted in January, cre‐ ator Brittany Pietsch films the virtual meeting where she's laid off by who she claims is two people she doesn't know.

"Enjoy the trauma," she writes in text overlaying the video.

There are ways to do it better

It's not always easy for an employer to strike the right balance when laying off a re‐ mote employee, Monkhouse noted, adding that asking people to come into the of‐ fice - potentially for the first time - just to get laid off would potentially be even more upsetting.

WATCH | Twitter em‐ ployees laid off in email:

But employers need to think carefully about how they approach layoffs and put themselves in the work‐ er's shoes, he warned, as those who feel they were mistreated in the process are "much more likely" to negoti‐ ate their severance package or start an official legal claim.

"A little humanity in termi‐ nating someone, which has a very large effect on that per‐ son, goes a long way," he said. "And it can really save money down the road."

Losing your job is a trau‐ matic experience, Venditti said, and the process of ter‐ minating someone should in‐ volve compassion, care, time and resources. People need to be allowed to ask ques‐ tions, she added.

Venditti says it's totally ac‐ ceptable to lay off remote workers virtually, but it should be done individually not in mass groups.

"Is it faster? Yeah. Is it nice? No," Venditti said.

"It's wrong - on a profes‐ sional level, on a HR level, on a personal level, it's wrong."