“We will also keep Slack and internal email open today for everyone so we can share farewells.”
That’s drastically different. Most orgs that’ve run layoffs over the last few years have terminated access immediately, or even before informing those losing jobs.
This feels more human, and I hope it goes well for them.
Most of the tech layoffs this cycle have done the same. Meta and Google left open coms access (email and chat) for at least the one day, pulling other more sensitive access. Definitely a positive change, but if I were a big tech lawyer I'd probably still be nervous lol.
The last time I got laid off was from a fintech company while WFH. It went like:
8am: Mysterious all-hands appears on all our calendars
10am: All-hands happens, layoffs announced
10:45am: Meeting with my manager happens
11:00am: I'm mid-slack-message with my team trying to coordinate a quick goodbye zoom chat when my laptop is remote-wiped and all access was cut off.
I totally understand why you'd do that and don't really fault them, but it certainly was a bummer. If you can safely do otherwise, it's a really nice gesture.
It let me exchange personal email addresses with a lot of great friends I won't get to work with anymore. I truly appreciate that Shopify did that for us.
I think the Irish Farewell is even better, just close the browser and walk away, if you really like your coworkers, you can spare them the uncomfortable conversation, and the Irish Farewell is a tiny way of polluting the culture of the thing that ejected you
Dropbox did it this way last week as well. The employees who were laid off were removed from work-related Slack channels but they had access to social channels and DMs so they could say goodbye.
I was laid off recently, and my now-former employer initially disabled accounts immediately, then reversed their decision and reactivated them (all while I was asleep). The first I knew that something was a bit awry was when I opened my laptop in the morning and saw I'd been logged out from Slack and removed from the GitHub org. The HR meeting invite then made it very clear what was going on and I wasn't permanently locked out until after that, a few hours later.
We also did this when we did a layoff last month (announcement was on a wednesday and people had access to email through the week). Agree with your sentiment.
The same way an anonymous internet person defaults to male American, "European" defaults to "Western Europe", which actually means "The original EU members, plus maybe England"
Right now I can't access any Slack channels, I can't access Google Drive/Docs, I can't send an email to an external address. I can only DM people and email people in the company.
In about 15 minutes I'll be shut out entirely.
As far as such things go it seems like a reasonable balance of humane consideration and legal prudence.
That’s drastically different. Most orgs that’ve run layoffs over the last few years have terminated access immediately, or even before informing those losing jobs.
This feels more human, and I hope it goes well for them.