Social-media backlash with layoffs has companies seeking guidance

Employers can get help to standardize the process.

Videos of disastrous layoffs accumulating on TikTok are prompting companies to seek help in delivering the bad news.

More people are sharing intimate details and recordings from workplace conversations that used to transpire behind closed doors. TikToks about getting laid off now are routinely dissected in public — from CEO mea culpa memos to awkwardly timed announcements and the precise intonation used by human resources managers.

Fear of social-media backlash has executives, especially from smaller tech firms that don’t have big HR operations, looking for advice on how to lay off employees without it blowing up in their faces. Onwards HR, a startup specializing in layoff logistics, says its customer base grew 300% last year.

“They’re like, ‘Can you tell us how to do it so that doesn’t happen to us?’” said Sarah Rodehorst, co-founder and chief executive of Onwards HR. “With social media, everybody’s watching.”

One recent post read: Layoffs are bad enough. Why worsen them with a poor delivery of that message? In my opinion, they fumbled it right from the beginning. Managers or HR or whoever does these meetings need to respect the impacted staff and provide an appropriate experience. Don’t place the blame on the employee.

While the overall jobs market remains robust, big job cuts nonetheless are showing up in a slew of industries to start the year. It’s most notable in tech, where several of America’s largest employers are cutting hundreds or thousands of positions. United Parcel Service Inc. also announced last week that it will slash 12,000 management jobs, and Citigroup Inc. has said it plans to eliminate 20,000 roles by 2026.

Onwards HR offers companies a centralized platform to standardize the layoff process, automate severance payments and enable smoother collaboration across HR, legal and finance teams.

But customers want more than just technology, Rodehorst said. They want stepby-step guidance on how to have tough conversations with people who are being let go. Rodehorst tells her clients that they should allow every laid-off worker the opportunity to meet with their manager to ask questions. Meticulous planning is another non-negotiable.

Rodehorst has culled these best practices from experience, but she’s considering offering more formal training and certification programs since there’s so much demand.

A mismanaged layoff can damage a company’s reputation and its recruiting. Last month, an employee at tech firm Cloudflare shared a recording of her layoff on TikTok, unleashing a torrent of criticism. In a statement on X, the CEO said Cloudflare made a mistake in “not being more kind and humane.”

Internally, layoffs can result in other employees calling it quits. Worker morale often languishes for months after a massive round of job cuts, said employer review site Glassdoor Inc.

Regardless of social media, HR experts say layoffs always should be handled with care.

“You could be ruining someone’s life,” said Jenny Dearborn, a veteran HR officer who has helped restructure tech firms, including the now-defunct Sun Microsystems, which recruited her in 2003 to help the company move some jobs abroad.

At Hewlett-Packard in the late 1990s, Dearborn says the company showed a tape of an executive talking about the emotional toll layoffs can take on individuals, their families and their identities. Decades later, one line stayed with her: “If you don’t stay up all night sick to your stomach, then you’re not doing it right.”

Last year, Kim Rohrer helped lead two job cuts at hiring and payroll platform Oyster that impacted about 120 people. The fully remote company had to comply with labor laws across 70 countries and coordinate day-of communication across time zones. It was “extremely complicated,” she said.

Rohrer and her team advised managers on how to deliver the news over Zoom — use a natural, warm and empathetic tone of voice — and what to do if the conversation got contentious. They had scripts prepared for different situations and different reactions. They also put together more than 20 pages of documentation addressing common questions, like how to access benefits and how handoffs would work for ongoing projects.

Here’s a trivia question you can use to stump fellow music nerds.

This Georgia-born, Black artist influenced musicians from the Allman Brothers to Bob Dylan to the White Stripes. There’s an annual music festival in his hometown, a milelong walking trail in his honor in another Georgia city where he spent much of his boyhood, and an Atlanta nightclub that bears his name. He’s in the Georgia Music Hall of Fame, and one of his signature songs is included in the “500 songs that shaped rock and roll,” assembled by the chief curator of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

The answer isn’t Little Richard or Otis Redding. And it’s not Ray Charles or James Brown. It’s Blind Willie McTell, a 12-string guitar bluesman who recorded dozens of songs in the 1920s and 1930s, died in obscurity in 1959, but whose music continues to inspire artists today.

“It’s a revelation to your ears,” Nashville-based singer-songwriter Adia Victoria said about hearing McTell for the first time.

Victoria, a South Carolina native, dove into blues music while living in Atlanta more than a decade ago. During that time, she found a recording on YouTube of McTell’s “You Was Born to Die.”

Victoria grew up in the Seventh Day Adventist Church where discussions about death centered on resurrection and