San Diego Union-Tribune

THE CHALLENGE OF BEING LAID OFF WHILE AT HOME

Angst has rippled across laptop screens, with dozens of companies announcing layoffs for thousands of workers and finding ways to breed extra chaos in the process

- BY EMMA GOLDBERG

“They’re immediatel­y cutting you off from your technologi­cal connection . ... People were in the middle of things and couldn’t continue and didn’t know who to address.” Sandra Sucher professor of management at Harvard who has studied layoffs for more than a decade

Kerensa Cadenas opened Slack on a Friday morning to an expletivel­aden message from a colleague that said essentiall­y: “I got let go.” Cadenas, steeling herself, checked her email. Then she typed out her own expletive. She’d been laid off, too. Alone in her New York City apartment.

Cadenas, with more than 100 of her Vox Media colleagues as well as thousands of other workers in the last few weeks, was submerged in a lonely, surreal wave of remote layoffs. People got the news through emails, Slack messages or video calls, then sent their goodbye notes and powered down their computers, with no teammates around to commiserat­e over beer.

“Normally you’re like, ‘OK, I can go get drunk,’” said Cadenas, 37, noting that atop the isolation comes frustratio­n with the instabilit­y that so many media workers have now come to accept as a fact of their working lives. “It’s scary because I’m like: ‘Will I ever have a savings account? Am I ever going to own something? Probably not.’”

Angst has rippled across laptop screens in the past couple of months, with dozens of companies announcing mass layoffs and even the most large and well-establishe­d workplaces finding distinct ways to breed extra chaos in the process. More than 1,000 tech companies laid off nearly 160,000 workers last year, according to Layoffs.fyi, which is tracking job cuts across the industry, and another 185 companies have cut some 57,000 tech workers since the start of this year.

Layoffs are among the most challengin­g life experience­s, causing more psychologi­cal stress than even divorce, according to one study. Losing a job can upend workers’ finances and their sense of self, and layoffs in the world of remote work have in many cases been especially destabiliz­ing, with employer missteps fueling uncertaint­y and unnecessar­y unknowns.

At Twitter, employees were notified in the middle of the night that they had been laid off, and at least one worker found out during a team call when that person lost access to company accounts. At the mortgage lending company Better.com, Rena Starr, 33, missed a short and unexpected Zoom meeting in 2021, then texted her boss to learn she and more than 900 of her colleagues had been fired during it. In a later round of job cuts at Better.com, last year, some employees there learned they had been laid off when severance pay hit their payroll accounts; this was months after the chief executive had apologized for summarily firing nearly 10 percent of the company’s employees in a roughly three-minute call just before the holidays.

“They’re immediatel­y cutting you off from your technologi­cal connection,” said Sandra Sucher, a professor of management at Harvard who has studied layoffs for more than a decade.

“I’ve been hearing of a number of companies where people were in the middle of things and couldn’t continue and didn’t know who to address.”

Many laid off workers are left with a long list of questions and an utter lack of clarity about who can help them. A recruiter at Amazon was told within four months of starting her job that it would almost certainly be cut, and she was encouraged to accept a severance package. She had to mail back her company computer and doesn’t have a personal one, making it challengin­g to search for a new job.

At some companies, people noted that their teammates were far more helpful than their employers after a layoff. Shortly after losing her job at an e-commerce marketing company in November, Erika Kwee, 32, heard from a colleague who had crowdsourc­ed a list of opportunit­ies and recruiter contacts to help Kwee navigate her search process.

But many remote workers don’t even have their colleagues’ phone numbers, and they don’t know who to go to for comfort or informatio­n. Beth Anstandig, a psychother­apist in the Bay Area, is seeing her clients bear the mental toll of this period.

“I hear that people are not sleeping, or sleeping two hours at a time on their couches,” said Anstandig, who is currently working with both clients conducting layoffs and those experienci­ng them, many of whom are distressed and overworked. “They’re in tears during our meetings together.”

Millions of American workers have never known a world without the specter of mass layoffs. That kind of instabilit­y has characteri­zed the economy since the late 1970s and ’80s, when the notion of prioritizi­ng shareholde­rs above all else took root and companies embraced the strategy of growing fast and then cutting down quick. Some executives rushed to frame that tumult as intrinsic to corporate life: In 1996, Robert Eaton, chief executive of Chrysler Corp., said that downsizing and layoffs are part of the price of becoming more competitiv­e. Now 85 percent of workers rank job loss as a top concern, according to the latest Edelman Trust Barometer.

Last year ended with job cuts across tech behemoths: Meta laid off more than 11,000 workers, or about 13 percent of its workforce, and Lyft laid off 13 percent of its workers. Google’s parent company, Alphabet, said last week it plans to cut 12,000 jobs, or about 6 percent of its global workforce; Microsoft plans to cut 10,000 jobs, or 5 percent of its employees; and other tech companies such as Zoom and Dell announced cuts last week. For many of these companies, these cuts followed years of free-flowing perks and flexible work arrangemen­ts that were part of what was called a “war for talent.”

“That is one of the great contradict­ions of corporate life,” Sucher said. “All corporatio­ns say ‘People are our most important asset,’ but they don’t really seem to believe that.”

“Calling someone ‘talent’ is quite different from calling them a person,” she added. “People aren’t a resource that can be depleted over time.”

But management experts stress that businesses don’t have to navigate periods of economic turbulence so haphazardl­y.

Sucher noted that Nokia, when it was restructur­ing in 2011, gave the roughly 18,000 people who would be affected about a year of advance notice and offered them several pathways forward: The company would help them find new roles internally, get new jobs externally, start their own businesses or begin an educationa­l program, among other options.

Nokia’s success metrics were whether people had a job lined up when they left the firm, and whether they were leaving with a positive enough impression that they would be open to returning in the future. Nearly two-thirds of people who left knew what their next steps would be.

“This is going to be the lasting impression that sticks with your previous employees, your current employees and all future employees,” said Tanner Hackett, chief executive of Counterpar­t, an insurance technology company that helps small businesses.

Hackett said companies frequently take a rushed approach to layoffs, as their shareholde­rs watch other industry layoffs happening and expect the same, which contribute­s to a climate of alarm and also leaves employers open to being sued for wrongful terminatio­n or violations of the WARN Act, a 1998 labor law that requires large businesses to give advance notice of mass layoffs. In recent weeks, Hackett has watched some companies move reactively instead of purposeful­ly in responding to the economic downturn.

Briana Boehmer, 44, drove to her office in Boulder, Colo., on Jan. 18 for what she thought was a normal executive meeting at the fitness technology company where she was the chief operating officer and had spent nearly six years working long hours and weekends to support customers. When the meeting started, the founders seemed nervous.

After a few unclear minutes, the chief technology officer jumped in: “So are you saying we’re terminated?”

It was a peculiar moment for Boehmer, who had spent recent months following the news about chaotic layoffs at other tech companies.

“I’ve been hearing it on these podcasts and being like, ‘Oh, that’s a shame, that’s a terrible way to do it,’” she said. “And then I’m like, ‘Oh, that just happened to me.’”

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GETTY IMAGES
 ?? JOHN TAGGART NYT ?? Google’s parent company, Alphabet, said it plans to cut 12,000 jobs, or about 6 percent of its global workforce.
JOHN TAGGART NYT Google’s parent company, Alphabet, said it plans to cut 12,000 jobs, or about 6 percent of its global workforce.

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