With casual brutality and tone deaf displays, tech companies like Google, Meta, and Twitter have laid off tens of thousands of workers over the past few months.
“It’s personally embarrassing for myself to have to explain to friends and family members why I’m getting fired,” says one former Meta employee, who was fired as part of the company’sBut it isn’t just the suddenness, but also the dehumanizing way that the announcements were made, which rankles staff who have been let go. When it finally came, the email telling Bowling he was being laid off from Google was “legalese,” and was signed off by the company’s vice president without any salutation.
The company has historically treated employees fairly well, even when they exit, according to Bowling. “This layoff was so different from the culture of how people leave the company,” he says.But for Susan Schurman, a professor of labor studies and employment relations at Rutgers University, the gap between how tech companies portray themselves and how they act was always there.
Attitudes toward staff have also worsened during the pandemic, according to Cary Cooper, professor of organizational psychology at the University of Manchester Business School. Remote working created a greater separation between managers and their employees. “There was less face-to-face contact, and much more of their communications were virtual,” he says. “That could create a situation where you don’t develop a close relationship with your employees, if you’re a line manager.
“Honestly, a couple of years ago, I started changing my mindset about the companies I work for,” says Alejandra Hernandez, a recruiting program manager at Meta, who was laid off in November after working for the company for a year. “I’m looking at it as: ‘This is a business, you hired me to do certain work.’” Hernandez points out that being employed in California means she’s employed at will, and can be terminated at any time—which helped recalibrate her thinking.
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