The New Rules of Layoffs

When McDonald’s Corp. said it would temporarily close its U.S. offices as it conducts layoffs at the burger chain, it brought renewed attention to a debate swirling inside HR departments: What is the best way to let people go?

The question is taking on urgency as more U.S. companies, from Goldman Sachs Group Inc. to Amazon.com Inc., move to shed staff in a wave of layoffs that is heavily concentrated on white-collar jobs.

When it comes to carrying out those cuts, companies employ a range of approaches designed to minimise the pain and disruption of a difficult process.

Here are six of the questions employers face.

All at once or a little at a time?

Many companies grapple with whether to make one sweeping layoff or do a series of smaller cuts. Both carry risks.

At a time when employers still face challenges filling positions, large job cuts can lead companies to inadvertently cut key units or people, executives say.

Yet, taking it slowly to give a company time to assess its financial situation can take a human toll, creating a prolonged period of anxiety and instability inside an organisation. Amazon.com has enacted more job cuts than expected in recent weeks, announcing last month that it would cut 9,000 more corporate jobs following earlier layoffs.

Face time or FaceTime?

Bosses long believed delivering the bad news face-to-face was the more humane approach. Covid-19 changed the equation. While many workers are being called back to the office, at least part time, full office attendance remains rare. Some executives are now asking themselves whether it is actually easier—and more humane—for employees to learn about a layoff on Zoom versus in-person.

“It almost seems cruel to ask someone to commute into the office just to let them go,” said Andy Challenger, senior vice president at outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc.

Midweek or Friday?

Just as with in-person firings, the conventional wisdom was Friday was the best day to carry out a layoff. That gave employees the weekend to process the news and plan their next steps.

That thinking has shifted. Many employers now see a midweek announcement as more humane, according to Lorna Hagen, a longtime chief people officer. A layoff on a Wednesday, Ms. Hagen said, can give employees time to talk to HR representatives or benefits providers during business hours in the ensuing days.

It’s not you—it’s me

One mistake managers continue to make, HR professionals say, is to tell employees how hard it is to let them go. “That just hits people the wrong way,” said Mr. Challenger. “It’s not about you.” The latest wave of layoffs often has felt like a competition among CEOs over who could craft the best apology.

Many executives have turned to lengthy memos to explain why they resorted to layoffs. Some of those notes look “suspiciously similar” across different companies, said Paul A. Argenti, professor of corporate communication at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth. He recommends that managers be as transparent as possible with employees about the health of a business so that no one is surprised when layoffs are announced.

Multiple months of pay, or less?

The size of exit packages is also up for debate. At the very least, companies should give laid-off employees a month of severance pay, corporate advisers say, though a number of employers have offered more. When Salesforce Inc. said in January that it would lay off employees, Marc Benioff, the company’s co-founder and chief executive, told workers that those in the U.S. would receive a minimum of nearly five months of pay, health insurance and other benefits.

Some smaller companies have received pushback from employees for not accelerating stock-vesting dates or for issuing severance packages that some saw as underwhelming. HR advisers recommend that companies be as generous as possible with exit packages. In an era when employees can easily sound off on a company even when they are being fired, it is also a best practice to develop a severance policy that can be defended.

OK, now who goes?

One of the last, toughest parts of any downsizing: determining who should be let go. The process of developing a layoff list is complicated and can stretch for weeks, with department heads and managers often debating which employees to eliminate. Seniority once guided layoffs, though it is now far more common for companies to assess skills over tenure, and to heavily consider someone’s recent performance.

HR officials will then often scrub a list, wanting to ensure that a company isn’t disproportionately laying off workers over the age of 40, or unfairly targeting minorities and others. Even with much preparation, many veteran HR leaders say layoffs can be messy. “There is no good way to do this,” said Gregory DeLapp, who spent much of his career in HR at the steel and materials manufacturer Carpenter Technology Corp.

Administrative cowardice. Rampant cheating. The soaking and scamming of undergrads and grad students. Performative wokeism. Intensifying competition for international tuition dollars from an expansive China.

These are either the latest dire headlines about American higher ed or the myriad subplots of “Lords of Serendipity,” an ambitious new novel by Randy Boyagoda. Unlike most campus fiction, its scope extends well beyond the cloister of the liberal arts classroom to whammy the entire university system, from its financial model to its function within a globalized economy. Along the way, it skewers its lightning-rod targets with a precision too sharp to be considered entirely fictional.

That its author is not only well-versed in satire, having written four other novels in the genre, but is also a professor of English at the University of Toronto and an experienced college administrator, further blurs the lines between comic fiction and brutal fact. It’s the kind of no-holds-barred book only a consummate insider would know to write—but only one who is also conveniently outside the American university system could get away with writing.

“This is someone who’s got the inside dope on what can go on at universities, especially with international students, and what kind of con games are going on,” said Margaret Atwood, a friend and fellow Torontonian.

The novel, like Boyagoda himself, is often very funny—even as the dilemmas its characters face read as tragedy. Its cast includes the bickering members of a Sri Lankan hotel cleaner’s family, insecure American freshmen, dead-end third-tier college professors and their highflying Ivy League counterparts and dispirited university functionaries. An old-fashioned Dickensian tale, it sweeps across continents and campuses, from a classic liberal-arts college to a stand-in for Harvard University to an urban technical school to the dilapidated buildings of a state-run university in Sri Lanka.

“I’m a joyful person,” Boyagoda said in an interview, though he prefers to see his outlook on academia as “hopeful” rather than optimistic. He smiles and laughs frequently. He bikes everywhere. He derives energy from his students and from his four daughters, ages 14 to 20. They help him and his American wife, Anna, also an educator, care for Boyagoda’s father, an immigrant from Sri Lanka who has dementia and lives with the family.

Randy Boyagoda speaks at a panel discussion. — Randy Boyagoda taking part in a panel discussion at the University of Toronto in 2024. Polina Teif/University of Toronto

The germ of the novel came to Boyagoda during the pandemic, when he was serving as a vice-dean. An urban legend was circulating about a statistics grad student selling passing grades to international students. The cheating scheme itself may well have been apocryphal, but it felt tantalizingly plausible.

“As a novelist, it stayed with me,” Boyagoda said. “Who would sell grades for a stats course? Why would someone buy grades? What’s motivating them? Why wouldn’t the university be doing something about it?” What he didn’t want to do, he explained, was write “another novel about a creative writing professor and his drama with students.”

In addition to writing novels—the first of which was a finalist for Canada’s prestigious Giller Prize; he’s written eight books in total—Boyagoda teaches literature full-time. For his students next semester, kids raised in a purportedly “post-literature era,” he’s assigning three 700-page novels, he noted mischievously, books by George Eliot, Ralph Ellison and Kiran Desai.

On RateMyProfessors, students remark on Boyagoda’s heavy assignments, tough grading and distaste for cellphones, but also hail his “comedy.” When alerted to these reviews, Boyagoda laughed. “Guilty as charged,” he said.

“Randy’s one of those people in academia who is very well educated but doesn’t have an ounce of superiority about him,” said John Irving, who frequently guest lectures in Boyagoda’s classroom. “It’s amazing to see how willing students are to talk in his classrooms, how little afraid they feel of being mocked or put down—he gets complete candor out of them.”

Negotiating competing interests seems to come naturally to him. Like many college campuses, after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, the University of Toronto was embroiled in protests, encampments and discord; part of the school’s response was to convene a working group on civil discourse. Boyagoda was put in charge, serving for two years. It’s the kind of thankless task many professors would flee from, but Boyagoda relished the prospect and thinks the group, which is ongoing, made progress.

He has since pivoted to another formidable academic concern: the waning prestige of the humanities. In July, Boyagoda became the director of the Jackman Humanities Institute and special advisor on the humanities to the dean of arts and science. This fall, he is starting a series of gatherings he calls the Dead Book Club. (Dead writers feature heavily among his favorites: St. Augustine, Dante, William Faulkner, Evelyn Waugh, Saul Bellow.)

“The goal is to encourage students to read for its own sake and have conversation for its own sake,” Boyagoda said. “The importance of the humanities will be revealed to those who participate.”

Illustration of the book cover for "Lords of Serendipity" by Randy Boyagoda, depicting a woman wearing a hat with various buildings on top, against a blue background with a white airplane.

“Lords of Serendipity,” which publishes next week, reflects Boyagoda’s commitment to the pursuit of knowledge: “I’m supposed to say I learn more from my students than they do from me, but no,” Boyagoda said. “I enjoy sharing my excitement and joy about literature and ideas. There are these moments when you are teaching and you can see someone’s face change because they didn’t know something and then they did. That moment when you’re actually watch someone enlarge themselves is deeply satisfying.”

In literary circles, Boyagoda is often referred to as a Catholic novelist, a description he embraces. “A novelist willing to give shape and voice to contemporary religious experience is needed,” Boyagoda said. “I understand myself as a Catholic novelist, provided that I’m not only a Catholic novelist, I’m also a South Asian novelist and I’m a Canadian novelist. I don’t want to be captive to one label.”

His characters, he said, are subjected to what he calls “Graham Greene character situations.”

“They are trying to do good in a fallen world and realize the most they can do is less harm than someone else would do in that same role,” he explained. “They have to accept they are complicit in something that provides some good thing to others. It’s a very Graham Greene way of thinking about sacrifice.”

The campus green they inhabit is a febrile zone in which lofty ideals and cynicism regularly collide. It’s a place where a traditional holiday college celebration is now an occasion for political protest. Kids freely police one another inside and out of the classroom with social media their constant, ready weapon of choice. International students, knowing their family’s financial futures hinge on their degrees, operate in terror of failure and deportation.

Early readers of the book include Gary Shteyngart and Junot Diaz, both of whom have taught at universities and written comic novels. They each contacted Boyagoda midway through to say, in essence, “You nailed it.”

As biting as “Lords of Serendipity” can be, Boyagoda’s faith in higher education remains undaunted.

“It’s absurd that we live in societies that make the decision to take people between the ages of 18 and 22, when they are most physically capable of contributing to our nations and communities, and tell them, ‘Go away for four years, and read and learn and have conversations,’” he said. “I want students to be aware of what an incredible privilege that is.”

Corrections & Amplifications
Randy Boyagoda is a special advisor on the humanities to the dean of arts and science at the University of Toronto. An earlier version of this article incorrectly said he is a special adviser to the dean of humanities. (Corrected on Sept. 2)