Unsolicited Advice: How to handle layoffs with care (Transcript)

Please note the following transcript may not exactly match the final audio, as minor edits or adjustments could be made during production.

Anne Morriss: Welcome to Fixable from the TED Audio Collective. I'm your host, Anne Morriss.

Frances Frei: And I'm your co-host, Frances Frei. 

Anne Morriss: This week we're bringing you another edition of Unsolicited Advice, where we give advice to people who didn't ask us for it. 

Frances Frei: Well, who's our lucky recipient today? 

Anne Morriss: Well, Frances, today's unsolicited advice isn't totally unsolicited.

We wanna address a question we see so often in our show inbox, which is what to do after your company experiences a layoff. Today we wanna talk to the people who have to pick up the pieces the next day. Senior leaders, managers, HR teams. 

Frances Frei: Oh, we get this question all the time. All the time. 

Anne Morriss: Yeah, we've coached a lot of leaders in organizations through this one.

I also wanna acknowledge that as we record this, there are whole public sector organizations, and organizations that rely on government funding, that are confronting large scale layoffs and disruption right now as the Trump administration works to reshape government. For those of you listening out there who are impacted and looking for work, we're thinking about you and the people who depend on you. We hope you'll listen to our episode from last season on job seekers and find something there that is helpful to you. The headline on our advice is to not do this alone. Your real enemy right now is isolation, so build a community to help you get through this difficult time. You're gonna get to the other side. We promise. 

Frances Frei: Absolutely. This kind of disruption to your life is a team sport. 

Anne Morriss: And Frances, in a future episode, we hope to give unsolicited advice to the architects of these decisions. Surprising to no one, our point of view is that "move fast and break things" is not the right approach here.

Frances Frei: Does that mean we're gonna give Elon advice? 

Anne Morriss: Yeah, we'd love to give Elon some advice, and his boss, and the Republican party because this is not just about one or two men at the top, which is how this story is being told. We gave advice to the Democratic Party last year, and it only seems fair to include our Republican friends as well.

Frances Frei: I do love symmetry. 

Anne Morriss: Yeah, just it's just balanced. Just going for fair and balanced, Frances. 

Frances Frei: I like it. I like it. 

Anne Morriss: In the meantime, today we're gonna talk to the people left holding the bag at any organization that's experiencing layoffs. We wanna answer the question, where do you go from here? 

Frances Frei: Let's get into it.

Anne Morriss: All right, Frances, put this conversation in context. If we look at tech as an illustrative example here, what seems to be happening is that after a spike in layoffs in the last few years, some companies are continuing to shed workers in 2025 and rethink exactly who they're gonna need to compete in an AI world.

As we record this, Meta just laid off about 5% of its workforce. Microsoft, Amazon, Salesforce, Google. They've all announced job cuts while still hiring for more specialized roles in AI and machine learning. I think a fair way to characterize the general mood is that even as the economic news is relatively good, at least here in the US, disruption and uncertainty in the business environment are still driving a fair amount of caution, and layoffs have almost been normalized at this point as a way to deal with our economic anxiety. 

Frances Frei: You know, that normalization, I find that it really underestimates the consequences of repeated layoffs. 

Anne Morriss: So what do you think companies are getting wrong about this calculus?

Frances Frei: Anytime a company has a layoff, they should do a deep dive and have the humility to understand where did I go wrong? 

Anne Morriss: Yeah. 

Frances Frei: 'Cause for sure a layoff is on the other side of you, senior executive. It's on the other side of your failure. So the first thing I think they're getting wrong is when they talk about it, they're not doing it with the humility and bit of shame around confessing a failure.

They're not taking it personally enough. They're almost doing it with like a jocular, muscular energy, like, look, we're tough enough to do this.

Anne Morriss: Mm-hmm .

Frances Frei: I'd like you to be humble enough to admit you've had a failure, because it's the only way you're gonna learn from your failure. 

Anne Morriss: Yeah. And just to underline that, 'cause that's where, that's exactly where we're going next.

I am sensing also the opposite in some organizations. Like hey, look at this as a sign of strength. We're willing to, uh, inflict this kind of damage on people. I don't know if it's, that's the kind of masculine energy, uh, some of these leaders are talking about, but I think they're deeply misreading the situation.

Frances Frei: Please, the role model of any energy is not failure dressed up as strength. Please, please, please. 

Anne Morriss: Yeah, I, I, for sure this step is not being framed as failure, and I want us to get into storytelling maybe in a structured way, but I mean, just to state maybe what's obvious, layoffs can help you make progress on some problems if you are making a strategic pivot.

If you are evolving to a more specialized workforce, if you're looking for, you know, a financial lifeline for whatever reason. Obviously this is a tool in the toolkit. Markets often will reward you, particularly in the short term if they interpret this move as a sign of a leaner and meaner workforce. But the cost of this decision often get less attention.

And I just wanna pause on this before we can jump into what you do about it, because I think it's material to where we're gonna go in this conversation. But if you look at the data, and some of your colleagues really study this rigorously, Sandra Sutcher, I'm thinking of, I, I know there are others. But if you pull the lens back and look at what happens next to companies, what you see is reduced innovation over time, lower team engagement, attrition of talented people, a culture of hesitation and fear that starts to kind of seep into the workforce unless you're deeply intentional about it. And so layoffs are this very blunt instrument with real collateral damage, and the path to competitive excellence is not littered with layoff announcements.

And I feel like that is getting lost in this whole story right now. 

Frances Frei: Yeah, a layoff is a failure to anticipate market trends. It's a failure to anticipate technology trends. It's not lost on me that the companies that say they want us to believe in their abilities to use AI in the future weren't able to use it to help anticipate what was going on today. 

Anne Morriss: Totally.

Frances Frei: So it, it's that, that is like deeply troubling to me and incongruous. Um, but it's also a failure to manage performance. Like if, if there are all these people that could be managed out now, well, what the heck are you doing with your day job over the last year? Right? Why, why was this not caught?

So it's, it's just showing a ineffective management. It's failure to anticipate. It's, it's that we weren't really doing, um, our job that well. And it's that we take the collateral damage of humans that leave and the collateral damage of humans that stay. We take it too lightly. 

Anne Morriss: A hundred percent. 

Frances Frei: I'm, I'm really stuck on when, when we work with companies in crisis, when they, when they've inflicted harm, the ones that are a successful turnaround, they really frame this the right way. And I have yet to see an organization recently frame this with any hope of, uh, of making a positive move forward. But maybe that's the point of this episode. Maybe we can help if they, if they want to.

Anne Morriss: Okay, so let's get into what doing this well looks like and, um, I'd like to position us as coaching well-intentioned leaders who remain at these organizations and whose job it is, is to bring this workforce that has just absorbed this pain, bring them along and into the future. So where do you start with that challenge?

Frances Frei: I would start with an apology. 

Anne Morriss: Some own it. Some own it energy. 

Frances Frei: Own it energy. Yeah. It will be very difficult to listen to any of the words that come out of your mouth if you don't own it in the beginning. 

Anne Morriss: Mm-hmm . 

Frances Frei: And so own what went wrong to lead us to this place. 

Anne Morriss: Yeah. 

Frances Frei: And your role in it. And the more sincere and the more specific, the more likely you are to repair the relationships that you have undoubtedly harmed. And I'm talking about the relationships within the organization, because you've destabilized them. You've injected trauma, particularly if you have made a habit of this over the last couple of years. So I would start with an apology. 

Anne Morriss: Yeah. And I like the list of mistakes that you start to articulate earlier, but if you have found yourself here where you have hired human beings and then let them go, right? And it's, and it's not for obvious performance reasons, either you over confidently predicted demand, which I think we saw that happen during covid, or the strategy that you assumed would work is not working. So one of the two things happened, and it's on you. And I, I love your advice to start with explicitly unambiguously owning it.

I made a mistake and it was not free. Both for the good people leaving and the good people staying. 

Frances Frei: Exactly right. And then my subtext is, and AI can help, people! Use your own products! AI can help. 

Anne Morriss: Yeah. 

Frances Frei: I would expect that the organizations or the parts of organizations that have really digested AI would be able to anticipate these much better than the rest of us using the old fashioned "whoops!"

Anne Morriss: Yeah. Well, I think that bridges it to the second point, which is, okay, own your historic mistake. Now bring us into the present tense. What is the plan? What is the plan to not make this mistake going forward, but what is the plan period? Because now you have a smaller workforce looking at all of its options for employment.

So you gotta make the case for staying and for really leaning in. So, what's your plan? What's, what's the update? What's the new strategy? What's the plan for better execution? What else besides letting people go, is the company doing to position itself to win? 

Frances Frei: And I think it's really important to do it in that kind of context, because as our dear friend and colleague Tom DeLong always advises, all ambiguous information, just assume it's being interpreted negatively.

So you have to fill in the story. 

Anne Morriss: I think about that bumper sticker all the time. All ambiguous information is interpreted negatively. We have a negativity bias, so if you want us to think positively about something, you have to be crystal clear about it. 

Frances Frei: Yeah, and I think optimism is really essential here, but it's hard to get to optimism with ambiguous information.

So I think after we've apologized, we gotta get to work on convincing people that we've got this. 

Anne Morriss: Yeah. Yeah, I, I love that. Own it. We've got this, step two. And then I think the third step here is to describe the future in rigorous and optimistic terms. So give us a plan for the present tense, and then tell us what the payoff is if we roll up our sleeves and help you build the next phase of this organization.

For instance, I'm struck by the research that Gallup does every year. And I think the latest data I saw was that only 15% of US employees strongly agree that their organization's leadership makes them enthusiastic about the future. And that, and in our experience, that number drops to single digits at best during a layoff.

Frances Frei: As you know, I'm gnaw off a limb competitive. If I was competing against companies that were doing these layoffs, I'd be salivating. Because what, what do we have to do? We've got to explain what happened, own it, address the present moment, and then give an amazing plan going forward. 

Anne Morriss: Yeah. Tell us about the future in vivid and specific language.

You know, tell us what it's gonna feel like when we get there. Give us a data driven case for why we're likely to get there, and then repeat it over and over and over again. I mean, one of the things I'm struck by is, you know, there's a lot of behind the scenes energy that goes into preparing for a layoff.

You know, uh, companies think about it for a long time. They think about how to do it. They think about, okay, how are we gonna compensate? Very deeply well intentioned. They send the email, like the grim layoff email. Uh, and they dispatch people to go and execute this, and then they breathe a sigh of relief, thinking that their work is done. That their, like, communications work is done. And they're, they've only done the first step. There's this huge communication need now to tell us of the plan. Right, and tell us what's gonna happen when we get there. Because you have the whole rest of the workforce that you now have to bring along and get buy-in from.

And I feel like the investment in that part of the challenge is just painfully, painfully, painfully short of the challenge. 

Frances Frei: If we were gonna bring this to advice to the people who are staying, realize that your job is to place a narrative in the minds of people that they can proudly and eagerly talk about in your absence.

Anne Morriss: Yeah. 

Frances Frei: And so you have to give us the rigorous and optimistic way forward in a language and with enough repetition that it sticks, so that I can talk about it to other people, and that those people understand it as if you said it to them. So in many ways, even though the whole organization, including you, dear leaders, has gone through a trauma, it's up to you now to get your Can Do Spirit.

And what I wanna advise is, you might be done with layoffs because you were planning it for a long time. And so you might be tempted to have an exasperated sigh, right? Or an exasperated disposition. 

Anne Morriss: Your disposition, you're done. You're ready to move on.

Frances Frei: And you might be disappointed with others who aren't matching your cadence.

You had months of a head start. 

Anne Morriss: Yeah, and so you've metabolized it. You've absorbed the shock of this. You've gotten yourself in the mindset to move forward, but the people around you are just beginning to move through those phases of metabolizing this information and their new reality. 

Frances Frei: When we talk about the storytelling for bold change, and I think that's what this is, we summarize it with honor the past. Create a clear and compelling change mandate, that's here. And provide a rigorous and optimistic way forward. So if I was gonna think about what's the summary advice from storytelling? Honor the past, and rigor and optimism about the future. And I would make that as tight as possible. 

Anne Morriss: And to your point, if you're somewhere stuck in the middle of this hierarchy, if, if we, if the pattern holds, your senior leaders probably have not thought deeply, rigorously, about how from a storytelling and from a support standpoint, they're gonna bring the rest of the workforce along. And so what can you do within the circle of influence that you totally control, it might only be with your direct reports, to block out, you know, these narrative steps with people?

We've seen it make a huge difference. Because part of that first step of owning the past, owning the mistakes, owning where we are, owning the costs for everyone leaving and staying? You're also making that discussable, you're bringing it out of the shadows. The individual pain that people are experiencing in their offices, and you're saying, yeah, no, this is collective pain.

We're gonna name it. We're gonna work through it, and we're gonna get to the other side together. 

Frances Frei: And that's not a "nice to have". High performing teams, as we know, and as influenced by the great Chris Argyris, high performing teams. A very key characteristic they have compared to everyone else is that they have the courage to discuss the undiscussable. And layoffs can be a third rail, like one person will say to another, oh, don't talk about it. Our senior team doesn't like to hear about it. That is not what the senior team should be looking for in an organization. In fact, the opposite,. Bring it up. Reward people for bringing up. Make sure that it is metabolized through everyone so that we can overperform.

So this is not a grin and bear it moment. 

Anne Morriss: Yeah. What I find so hopeful about Argyris's research on this, and it really did fall out of a lifetime of work on identifying the variables that really explain high performing teams. And then here's the part that really excites me. They're not even that good at it.

Frances Frei: Yeah. You don't even have to be good at it. You just need, this is courage over , competence. Totally. Courage over competence. 

Anne Morriss: 'Cause sometimes, you know, I have this people-pleasing side, and so I will pause in the face of conflict sometimes, and I have to like steel myself for it. And I go back to this again and again because his research doesn't conclude, if you're a UN level conflict negotiator, uh, discuss the undiscussable, but everybody else, but everybody else stay clear.

You know, this, this stuff is high stakes for you to touch. No, his point is really all of us need to get in there and find a way to make this stuff discussable.

Frances Frei: So that we right-size it.

Anne Morriss: And it's not to feel good. Right? No. This is a hardcore variable that defines high performance. 

Frances Frei: Yeah. 

Anne Morriss: So now Frances, I wanna throw out a couple other things to think about if you are the one who has the ball in this complicated moment.

One, I wanna talk for a second about the employee value proposition, because you may be in a situation where you can't offer stability or security. It may be a fast moving situation. You may not be able to guarantee that there won't be layoffs again. But I think there's an interesting question about what can you offer in those moments? When I've seen people do this really well, it's an opportunity to have a clear adult to adult conversation with the people around you that is roughly, "I am not gonna protect you from the truth here. I can't make any guarantees. But if you stay right, and if we figure this out together, we are building a future where you will have a place." So this is a high risk, high reward situation. I'm not gonna shield you from the risk part, but I wanna have a very clear conversation about the reward.

Frances Frei: I love that because it's acknowledging we are in an risky environment. Then we would expect compensation to be different than if we're in a safe environment. Yep. We would expect that my need to give you experiences and education to augment all of the rest of it. Also, compensation experiences, education.

You gotta dial all of those way up to make up for what you have dialed way down, which is security. 

Anne Morriss: A hundred percent. And you may be in an environment where comp can't be on the list today.

Frances Frei: But then make sure it's experiences and education. Make sure you have really gone after the other one. 

Anne Morriss: Yes, and let's talk about compensation tomorrow.

Frances Frei: Oh, yeah. Good.

Anne Morriss: When we hit it out of the fucking park. Because your employees are all thinking about it, so you not talking about it is not helping you in any way.

Frances, there's a, there's another category I wanna make sure we really hit, which is how to take care of yourself in an environment like this. Bringing a network of human beings through this, and we keep saying trauma, and I don't wanna casually use that word. 

Frances Frei: It's okay.

Anne Morriss: It really is often experienced as trauma for the people staying. Being responsible for those human beings. Absorbing this experience and getting to them to the other side, it takes an extraordinary amount of emotional energy. What do you personally need so that you can show up for work the next day in a sturdy place being able to create an environment where the people around you can get back up and start to thrive again?

It's a very personal question and it's not optional. It's not indulgent. It is in the best interest of you and it is the best interest of your employer to figure that out really quickly and to solve for it. 

Frances Frei: So two things come to mind. One is, it's why we need a team so that no one of us is on 24/ 7. Right?

The great research by Leslie Perlow showed us that teams that share the 24/ 7 burden outperform teams where everyone is on 24/ 7, so let's share the 24/ 7. That's the first thing. The second thing is what we know from the trauma ward, and I do think it's the right word, is they have shorter shifts. 

Anne Morriss: Mm-hmm.

Frances Frei: And so, uh, you can do it, but understand that it's like you're metabolizing food and energy and stress at a very different rate. And so you gotta go off camera, you gotta go take timeouts at a much higher clip. If it were you, Anne Morriss, the amount of food you would have to consume, I mean, you eat. How many times a day now? You would just be eating nonstop. 

Anne Morriss: I eat every three hours.

And I, this, it would go down to 90 minutes for sure. And it has, when I've been in this situation of having to lead people through layoffs. Amy Cuddy calls this surge capacity when she talks about this challenge. So, uh, how do you solve for your own surge capacity? And it requires deep intention and deep care of yourself in order for you to be of service to the human beings around you.

Frances Frei: Thank you so much for listening to this episode. Your participation helps us make great episodes like this one, so please keep reaching out. If you wanna figure out any questions about your workplace problems together, send us a message, email, call, text. Fixable@ted.com, 2 3 4 FIXABLE. That's 234-349-2253.

We read and listen to every single message.

Anne Morriss: Fixable is brought to you by the TED Audio Collective and Pushkin Industries. It's hosted by me, Anne Morriss.

Frances Frei: And me, Frances Frei. 

Anne Morriss: This episode was produced by Rahima Nasa from Pushkin Industries. Our team includes Constanza Gallardo, Banban Cheng, Daniella Ballarezo, and Roxanne Hai Lash. 

Frances Frei: And our show was mixed by Louis at Story Yard.