Silent lay-offs are rarely as quiet as bosses hope

The annals of mishandled restructurings are full of classic episodes, made worse by technology. Workers have suffered mass redundancy by Tannoy, voicemail, text and Zoom. Now, PwC’s UK arm has charted new territory with an attempt to orchestrate a round of “silent lay-offs” by email. 

The Big Four firm’s bid to mute the farewells of colleagues participating in a “targeted voluntary severance” has turned out to be far from silent. It may not even be that new. More successful attempts to stop outgoing workers broadcasting their redundancy are, by definition, hard to detect.

PwC’s mistake appears to be that it told those leaving to not mention they had accepted a settlement to go, then advised them how to word their goodbyes. For example: “Following recent discussions with my [relationship leader], I have taken the decision to leave PwC. It hasn’t been an easy decision for me to reach but now that I have, I am excited about what the future holds for me and the new opportunities on the horizon. I have really enjoyed my time at PwC and the opportunity to work with such talented colleagues.”

There is no quicker way to ensure corporate secrets are revealed than to insist they remain under wraps. The emailed edict “not [to] refer to the voluntary severance offer or the circumstances of leaving” became last weekend’s second best-read FT story. Someone in PwC’s human resources team may now themselves be feeling less “excited about what the future holds”.

Of the potential explanations, the HR-bashers were quick to point to the evil or incompetence of personnel managers who had fallen over themselves to expel surplus staff while avoiding a panic, or a rush for a limited pot of redundancy payment.

Yet most companies go through periodic restructurings. Sometimes because they have to reverse mismanaged expansion, but often because fluctuating demand has left the right people in the wrong place. 

It is possible that PwC is simply out of practice. Professional services firms are used to hiring thousands and letting high levels of natural attrition do the lay-offs for them. Young auditors and consultants do short stints at the Big Four — long enough to pass their professional exams or add the logo to their LinkedIn profile — and then move on to the next career challenge. 

But a slowdown in demand has led to retrenchment, and headlines. Deloitte, using the same word as PwC, launched a “targeted” restructuring last year that was attacked for planning to cut 150 junior consulting jobs — curtailing the careers of staff who had joined only one or two years earlier. McKinsey, master of the diplomatic “up or out” approach to employee ejection, has had to take a sharper axe to underperformers. They are now, euphemistically, “counselled to leave”.

White-collar rejects do occasionally make noise, which may also explain PwC’s attempt to silence the soon-to-be-severed. One PwC trainee auditor who failed his audit exams in 2016 went viral with his ill-judged outgoing email blast, explaining: “I haven’t particularly enjoyed much of [my] time at PwC largely related to exam stress and having a low boredom threshold.”

The most charitable interpretation is that PwC’s email was the product of an over-enthusiastic effort by an HR officer to prepare a mass response to genuine individual inquiries about how to delicately manage what can be an awkward office experience. 

Whatever the explanation, the redundancy diktat was itself redundant. In my experience, most people who opt to take a pay-off to quit do not crow or complain about it. They do not need to. Most of their colleagues know what has happened through the office grapevine, which is invariably more efficient and accurate than most HR-mediated intra-company communications.

Whether the Gen Z trend of “loud quitting” via TikTok and other social media becomes more widespread remains to be seen. But unhappy leavers mostly recognise that it serves no purpose to grumble publicly, lest it annoy a potential future boss or client. Happy ones want to move on, using their payout as a springboard to a better or different path. For both groups, casting themselves as the dumper rather than the dumpee suits the narrative of their next episode.

Please, though, if you are going to cut and paste the PwC script, drop the bit about setting out towards “new opportunities on the horizon”. Save the clichés for when you finally make it — then boast openly that being laid off by a Big Four accountancy firm was “the best thing that ever happened” to you.

andrew.hill@ft.com