The Restructurings Will be Televised

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A close friend was hired by a tech company a number of years ago to build a new sales team. The group grew to about two dozen and hit its targets. 

Last year, my friend was called into a room and told to fire everyone as part of a general restructuring. The company had committed to cutting its workforce by 3 percent.

The company didn’t have time to cherry pick who to fire and that would expose them to legal risk anyway. They needed a few medium-sized patches of people that added up to several hundred heads. 

My friend’s group was unlucky enough to be big enough to make a dent, but small enough so it wasn’t too disruptive. 

HR gave my friend a script and sat there as they called each person. The instructions were to read the words without deviation. Then everyone’s email and corporate access was cut off.

There is a playbook for firing people in America these days. Your manager books a sudden Zoom meeting. You dial in to find HR on the call. They tell you your position is being eliminated. 

In recent weeks, we’ve seen signs that the script is being disrupted.

First, in a widely covered example, a young sales rep at Cloudflare named Brittany Pietsch videotaped her own firing. It was posted on TikTok and viewed millions of times. 

Next, a woman who worked at Kyte Baby, a baby clothing company in Texas, was denied a request to work at home, indicating she had to leave. A TikTok video appeared. The Kyte Baby CEO posted a video to apologize and then a second to apologize for the first apology. The decision was revised.

Much of the media coverage of these two events focused on the specific reasons for the decisions or the clunky ways the messages were conveyed. 

The real takeaway is that we’ve entered a new era in which social media, particularly in the hands of Gen Z, is being used to level the playing field. 

Corporations should realize they no longer control the narrative as absolutely as before.

Employees are saying, effectively, we aren’t going quietly. 

It’s a sea change from before when employees tended to hang their heads when let go. 

I think there are two big reasons for the change. 

First, many of the layoffs we are seeing these days, from Amazon to Google, are from fundamentally very profitable companies. These are not failing industrial firms. 

Second, the firings are often decoupled from individual performance. Companies determine they need to cut a percentage of headcount to meet financial targets. 

Once employees realize that their individual performance doesn’t protect them and working for a profitable company won’t matter either, it will change their mental calculations and how they react.

We saw that with Brittany Pietsch at Cloudflare. By sharing the video, she shed light on the process.

Some commentators chastised her for raising a fuss, saying it would hurt her chances to get another job. 

Instead, she received numerous job offers, including an invitation to speak to a recruiter at Salesforce.

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