Have you experienced an “involuntary career event” recently? Perhaps you have been a victim of “corporate displacement,” the unfortunate, but seemingly necessary, result of “rightsizing” your company. Managers are running out of ways to say you no longer have a job.
Layoffs in the first month of 2024 have left tens of thousands of people jobless, with the tech sector alone cutting 32,000 jobs. How bad news is communicated is more important than ever, as companies fear being deleted from social media after a poorly executed final conversation. Managers use all kinds of euphemisms to avoid being direct with their employees.
Harvard Business School professor Sandra Sucher said soft speech is the result of “moral disengagement,” the harm-doer’s effort to rationalize and soften the action for himself. Ultimately, the meaning is the same for the worker: they are losing their job.
“Just because you call it downsizing or organizational change — which it probably is — doesn’t mean workers won’t feel something as a result of what you’re doing,” Sucher said.
According to Sucher, a lexicon to euphemistically describe layoffs became more common in the late 1980s and 1990s as job cuts became normalized. Previously, layoffs were rarer and were mostly the result of a manufacturer in a city closing its plant.
In early December, Spotify Technology SA opted for the term “right-size” in its letter announcing job cuts. Citigroup Inc.’s November statement referred to a “simplified operating model” to describe its plans to cut 20,000 jobs. At Meta Platforms Inc., Mark Zuckerberg referenced “organizational changes” in a lengthy memo that included a series of staff shifts at the company, including job losses. And United Parcel Service Inc. announced a “workforce reduction” of 12,000 people during its most recent earnings call. “We will adapt our organization to our strategy,” Chief Executive Carol Tomé said, according to a transcript.
Managers believe this kind of vague language appeases workers, according to Stanford professor Robert Sutton. He called the “anesthetizing” language “monoxide jargon.”
“Somehow they seem to believe that if they use vaguer, less emotional language, people won’t get as angry,” Sutton said. Instead, she said, it has the opposite effect.
According to Wayne Cascio, a professor at CU Denver Business School, the general abandonment of the word “layoff” is likely due to the stigma associated with it. The term “layoffs” is used to describe dismissal without cause, while “termination” today is typically in response to a violation of company rules.
Synonyms for layoffs are not entirely purposeless. They have differences in their breadth of potential meaning that help a company resolve next steps. “Simplification” may mean that people will be fired or that the company will reduce meetings. “Restructuring,” on the other hand, can also simply mean that an employee is changing departments. A “leave of absence” is something completely different, allowing employees to return to work after an unpaid period of absence. According to Cascio, the term “rightsizing” is intentionally vague to leave room for the company to change its plan.
The wording can also vary from region to region, according to Sucher, who says “force reduction” is used more commonly in Europe.
In general, there is a good way to announce a layoff, and that’s not a euphemism. Business leaders should take responsibility for job losses, experts said, especially as many are responding to their own post-pandemic hiring glut.
“You have to acknowledge the fact that you did something that you understand hurt their lives in a very direct way,” Sucher said.