Editor’s note: This is the latest installment of the Working Better column on how to improve the higher-ed workplace. Read the previous essays here.
Layoffs are a taboo topic in higher ed. The subject gets minimal attention (if any) in training programs for new supervisors or on the agenda of leadership-development programs. Likewise, the people who’ve been downsized aren’t typically broadcasting it — either because they have signed a nondisparagement agreement or they fear their job loss will be chalked up to poor performance. By relegating layoffs to the shadows, both leaders and employees are less prepared to cope when they happen.
And they’re happening more than usual lately in academe. In just the past few months, institutions including Stanford, Duke, and Michigan State Universities, and the Universities of Southern California and Oregon have announced layoffs. Even more may be on the horizon, given the Trump administration’s ongoing extortions, cuts to research funding, drastic reduction of the student-aid infrastructure, and slow processing of international-student visas. Since layoffs can be “contagious” or spike as part of an industrywide “copycat” phenomenon, we may be in for a long year of job volatility in higher ed.
My goal here is to bring layoffs ever so slightly into the light of day. Not in an effort to facilitate the contagion, but rather to recognize their reality and prevent unnecessary pain. I see layoffs as a workplace practice falling somewhere on a continuum from bad to truly awful.
Although layoffs are a tool that organizations lean on to achieve a particular goal, they’re not a universally effective change lever. Layoffs can sweep up high-achieving employees with considerable training and institutional knowledge. Morale among remaining employees can drop, and attempting to plug holes and pick up the pieces can cause those who remain to burnout and leave. Layoffs may provide short-term cost-savings without fixing an organization’s underlying issues. Given their checkered effectiveness, leaders have good reason to seek alternatives.
And yet layoffs may, at times, be unavoidable. If an institution has exhausted all options and deems layoffs necessary, its leaders’ top priority should be to mitigate the damage and treat people with dignity. People who are laid off may struggle to find a new position at equal pay, see a dip in lifetime earnings that may never recover, and are more likely to develop new health conditions. Research shows that women and people of color tend to be laid off at higher rates.
I want to put one caveat right up front: I’ve never been laid off. As sometimes happens in my writing on the workplace, I’m not offering advice from a place of firsthand experience. Rather, I’m relying on research I’ve read and interviews I’ve conducted with people who were laid off, who have studied layoffs, and who have announced or orchestrated layoffs.
What follows is my best effort to synthesize their recommendations for leaders, bearing in mind that there is no magic formula that will turn this lemon into lemonade.
Bob Sutton, a professor emeritus of management at Stanford and best-selling author of The No Asshole Rule and Good Boss, Bad Boss, wrote his dissertation in the 1980s on how managers should communicate painful business decisions to employees. After years of study, he boiled down his recommendations for leaders to these four principles:
- Predictability. Give employees as much information as possible about what will happen and when.
- Understanding. Articulate a clear explanation for layoffs and what effect they will have on the organization.
- Control. Present options to downsized employees and give them some say in what happens to them.
- Compassion. Step into the shoes of someone receiving the news and make a sincere effort to soothe their anxiety.
For Sutton, the four principles reflect “procedural justice” — defined as the way “people’s perception of fairness is strongly impacted by the quality of their experiences and not only the end result of these experiences.” As Sutton put it more succinctly: “It’s not just what you do; it’s how you do it.”
Layoffs should be the final step of an exhaustive process to avoid layoffs. Using Sutton’s principles as a guiding framework, I offer my own list of four tips for campus leaders who have reached that final step and now face the prospect of carrying out layoffs.
Don’t skimp on the planning. Once the decision has been made to cut jobs, a new round of intense preparation must commence. Leaders should prepare for each step of the downsizing: What factors will form the basis of individual layoff decisions? What terms can the institution afford to offer? What questions might downsized employees have, and how should you answer? What training and support will be provided for the people tasked with delivering the bad news? Plan for multiple scenarios as employees react and seek to make sense of what’s happening.
George Cangiano, a higher-ed consultant, had to deal with his share of downsizing during his 30 years as a campus human-resources officer. In carrying out layoffs, he recommended pairing each supervisor with an HR staff member to break the news. Before signing off on a particular layoff, he explained in an interview: “We would always try to see if someone could be redeployed in another role and check to make sure that a [leader] wasn’t trying to move a problem along that they hadn’t dealt with. The position elimination should be clearly warranted.”
Every detail of the separation package should be worked out in advance, with an end goal of trying to anticipate questions, even the simplest ones such as: “Will I be able to keep my work laptop?” That was a concern of several people I interviewed because they didn’t own another computer and would need one for job hunting. Institutions could include it as part of the severance by, ideally, absorbing the modest cost of letting an employee keep their laptop after wiping it of any sensitive or proprietary information. There is a difference between structural cost-saving and excessive penny-pinching.
During this planning period, guidance from human-resource experts becomes crucial. Yet among those I interviewed were plenty of people who had been laid off from HR positions in higher ed, raising questions about whether institutions have the personnel and expertise on hand to ensure the process is thoughtful and informed by research.
Be clear on the why, and on what comes next. Krista Vaught had spent three years at Vanderbilt University in a staff position when she found herself with a new boss. The new leader talked more and more of pending changes until one day last year Vaught received a nondescript invitation to a Zoom meeting. “I was, like, we’re gone,” she recalled in an interview. “This is it. I just have a sense that this is happening.” Another person I interviewed called this the “dementor moment,” when air is sucked out of the place and you sense things are about to go south.
In the months after Vaught was let go, she saw more layoffs across higher ed as a response to resource uncertainty. But in her case, she said, “there did not appear to be an obvious budget issue, since new spending was visible. So it was hard to explain the situation, other than noting that the organization was just going in another direction, one we didn’t yet understand.”
Leaders owe it to the people losing their jobs to offer full explanations for the decision. Being unable to give a clear “why” raises questions about what purpose the layoffs truly serve. Few people I interviewed expected leaders to offer tearful apologies. But all too often, their heavily scripted, clipped style of communication made the process feel like it was directed by legal counsel trying to avoid a lawsuit.
There is a middle ground — one where leaders communicate with directness and clarity while still looking their soon-to-be ex-colleagues in the eye and acknowledging the hurt this decision has caused.
Likewise, the rest of the campus needs to understand both the reasoning for the layoffs and the vision for the institution or department going forward. Someone in a senior leadership role should take responsibility for the downsizing decision, make clear that it represents organizational failure versus problems with individual performance, and deliver a message to those who remain and have legitimate concerns about their future.
Conduct an audit of who is being laid off and what they do. The audit can help you answer several crucial questions, such as which work duties will be dropped and which will be parceled out to the remaining employees. Your staff will not react well to doing the same amount of work with fewer people. Part of your preparation has to focus on how you will boost morale among those who keep their jobs.
Another key issue the audit may help clarify: determining how best to cover the responsibilities of people between their layoff notice and their final date of employment. This is a good place to insert choice in the process. Some employees may be willing to continue fulfilling their duties, helping with the transition and wrapping up projects they value. Others may prefer to stop working with a longer period covered by severance.
There will be awkward moments in this period. For example, at Vanderbilt, “some of my colleagues were still responsible for welcoming new employees every Monday through the campus-orientation program, while also navigating the reality that our own roles were being eliminated,” Vaught said.
Her own team had several workshops planned before the layoffs and, afterward, kept getting new requests from other departments. She had to keep explaining that her “team had been impacted by a restructuring and was not available to fulfill the request,” Vaught said, but she “provided other resources they could use.” It was frustrating to know that the team’s work was valued across the campus, yet no one had explained whether that work would continue. “People would ask when workshops would be offered again,” she said, “and we didn’t have an answer because we didn’t know what future support would look like.”
Another interviewee, who wished to remain anonymous, said he’d been downsized several times by small private colleges in the last few years. In his most recent layoff, he had been given a week to wind down his tasks, which was problematic because he was the institution’s Title IX coordinator and designated official for managing international-student records. He scrambled to recertify the F1 visas of 43 international students so they and the institution didn’t suffer.
“In such moments, one could say, ‘I don’t owe [the institution] anything,’” he said. “But we also have our values and character. Ending well can be our last gift to our students.”
When Matt Nazario-Miller was laid off this fall from his position as a communication manager at Stanford University, he created an informal survey for colleagues to share about their layoff experience. He noticed in his small sample that there was a high concentration of professionals who come from historically marginalized backgrounds. Although Stanford attributed the layoffs to “ongoing economic uncertainty,” it also dissolved the Office for Inclusion, Belonging, and Intergroup Communication in August.
Bias and discrimination can play a role in layoff decisions in the same way that they can in hiring and promotion. Establishing transparent criteria for layoff decisions helps mitigate bias. An audit can reveal whether the criteria were followed and employees were treated fairly, or if factors beyond organizational efficiency are at play.
Provide useful resources to help people transition. Many laid-off people face a challenging path to re-employment in today’s tepid job market. Those hoping to stay in higher ed often face a search process that sprawls over months. One survey of recently laid-off U.S. workers found that half of respondents submitted more than 50 applications, and a third spent 90 days or more on the job market before finding their next role.
Everyone I interviewed received some type of separation package that included career-transition support. However, no one was overwhelmed by the quantity or quality of said support. Many had received priority status in applying for other jobs within the institution, but not surprisingly, they had mixed feelings about staying on the campus and felt pessimistic about their odds of landing a position with a similar title and pay as their old job.
As a leader, you should aim to offer a mix of career-transition assistance, such as access to coaching, outplacement services, or mental-health support. Give people the option to meet with benefits coordinators to answer health-care, investment, and insurance questions. Cangiano, the former HR officer turned consultant, suggested institutions offer people a letter emphasizing that their layoff was due to institutional finances or reorganization, not to an employee’s performance.
Don’t be in such a hurry for the institution to “get past this” that you create the impression that you are disappearing people. Create opportunities for laid-off workers to say goodbye to friends and colleagues. The anonymous staff person I interviewed emphasized the importance of creating ways to “honor the person on the way out. That can mean paying for a farewell reception, and it can mean reading the situation and staying away from the farewell reception.”
Having listened to all these stories where people related in detail one of the hardest days of their professional lives, what I learned is that conducting layoffs with care isn’t so much about using soothing words or a soft tone. It’s about designing a thoughtful process and implementing it with integrity and empathy. No one is going to walk away from the experience happy, nor will a humane layoff process earn leaders any accolades.
But leadership isn’t ultimately about leading institutions or campuses. It’s about leading people — whether it’s their first day on the job or their last. Few things define leaders and the culture they are trying to shape more than how they let someone go.
“People are watching,” Cangiano said. “They see someone here one minute, gone the next. They see when someone is shamed. And on a grander scale, the question becomes: Is that in line with your culture, or is that the culture?”
