How not to fire someone

Martina sent this link, illustrating just how clueless some companies are when they have to downsize:

The list of dehumanized moves is long and not likely to get shorter in an age where speed, telecommuting, cost cutting, efficiency and assets rather than human capital are king.

"The things that get done in the name of expediency are quite shocking," said Dale Klamfoth, senior vice president at WJM Associates, an executive and organizational development firm.

Just last week we were treated to news of 400 employees at Radio Shack who were laid off by e-mail.

Before that we heard of money-saving tips offered to newly laid-off employees at Northwest. The list includes helpful advice like "Don't be shy about pulling something you like out of the trash" and that ever-useful tip when you lose a job: "Bicycle to work."

I've had some doozies in my career as well. One of my favorites was when my employer was planning to lay off a significant portion of the development staff. I received a meeting invitation for later in the week, titled "Strategic Planning". Oddly, among the invitees to the meeting were two of my staff members, three other development managers, a trainer, and one of the receptionists. You could say that I got very little productive work done for the rest of that week.

Another employer had laid off 90% of the development staff while I was on vacation, but nobody thought to let me know what had happened. I walked in to the office on Monday morning . . . and there was nobody there. At first, I thought I'd somehow come in on Sunday, but the traffic had been normal for a Monday morning. I found the only other survivor from my department by following the sounds of clicking keys. He told me the story of the layoff: everyone had been called in to a meeting, the doors had been closed (with security guards posted), and people were called out of the room one at a time. The people who were called out were the ones being let go. Everyone else had to wait until either their names were called or the VP of HR came back into the room to announce the end of the layoff.

It took over two hours.

Almost the only even slightly amusing thing about the story was that one of the VP's, who had been particularly brutal in telling his staff that they were being laid off, was the last person laid off. He supposedly didn't know that he was also on the list.

The only survivors were those staff members working on a project for which the company had a paying customer waiting for the work to be complete (we all assumed that we'd be gone immediately after we delivered the new software package, so most of us were busy looking for other work at the same time).