• Companies announcing layoffs need to ensure they have a well planned strategy.
• Failure to do so could lead to the business embarrassing itself.
• It could even lose more valuable employees and customers in solidarity to the poorly-treated.

When it comes to layoffs, most companies need to have a proper plan and strategy in place to ensure the process does not lead to any untoward incidences. While many people assumed they had seen the worst of layoffs during the pandemic and in 2023, the first two months of 2024 are so far proving to be as brutal as the last few years. There is no denying that companies conduct layoffs only after trying every other possible strategy available to them.

But layoffs are sometimes inevitable for organizations of all sizes around the world. So how can a company conduct a layoff without disrupting its reputation? While some companies have been able to do it quietly, the big tech enterprises normally end up getting the most negative reactions.

There’s a logic there – from the employee’s point of view, it’s difficult to see mega-companies (in any industry) having difficulties when they have colossal resources available to them. The deferential between the company’s difficulties and the employee’s difficulties when laid off are too massive to often let the laid-off employee see the strategic necessity of their redundancy.

In Southeast Asia, e-commerce giant Lazada, which is a subsidiary of the Alibaba Group, came under heavy criticism recently on how it conducted its layoffs. According to reports, employees were left dumbfounded after realizing they were not able to schedule meetings upon returning from their year-end holidays.

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