"Mass hysteria at 7:30 a.m." Why are employees the last to know?

You may recall the story of Vishal Garg, CEO of mortgage lender startup Better.com. After receiving a $750 million cash infusion with a valuation of around $7 billion, Garg bluntly informed his 900 employees during a 3-minute Zoom call that around 15% of its workforce was fired.

“If you’re on this call," Garg said, "you are part of the unlucky group that is being laid off. Your employment here is terminated effective immediately.”

We are now at the height of lay-off season.

Last week, Carvana, an online used car dealer, laid off 2,500 employees, many of them over Zoom, the company confirmed to Protocol.

"You just fired us in a zoom meeting and said 'have a good day' at the end," one Twitter user posted. "I am so disgusted by how this was handled." Another user posted that an email preceding the Zoom call had caused "mass hysteria at 7:30 a.m." because it didn't indicate who would be affected by the layoff.

Another stomach-churning change is Mergers & Acquisitions (take-over, buy-out, and its other variants). Just ask the leadership team at Twitter as they responded to Elon Musk's designs to take Twitter private. 

Here's an unusually thoughtful article about the ripple effects of how change is communicated to Twitter employees. (Links to an external site.)

Many of my clients work in the field of HR. All my clients, as business leaders, are concerned with managing human capital.

What should we make of the all-too-common choice (and it is a deliberate choice) where employees are the last to know about significant change in their own organizations? 

Culture, behavior, branding, trust, messaging, stakeholders, leadership. All these success factors are on display in the unforced errors committed by Better.com, Carvana and Twitter in communicating large-scale change.

But the common thread that connects them is trust: These organizations don't trust their own employees, the very people who make the product/service, keep the company promise to customers on behalf of leadership, consume the product/service, own shares in the company, recruit new employees, and serve as brand ambassadors.

If you'd like to know more about how to communicate change in healthy ways that support all your stakeholders -- while building trust -- DM me.