How to communicate bad news to your remote team

When it comes to communicating disappointing news to your remote-based employees, there are plenty of examples of what not to do. We’re not even in the “wake” part of Q4 2022’s tech layoffs, we’re still very much riding a rising wave, and the “how” is making the news as much as the “who”.

So we can agree… Don’t go on Linkedin and fake cry and pretend you’re the victim when you’re really the CEO and you still have a job. Don’t be a billionaire and buy a social media platform that was very famously unprofitable and rife with controversy and then fire thousands of people in 24 hours without warning like you’re surprised how economics work or something. Don’t dump a gazillion dollars into convincing people we’re all ready to live our lives wearing VR headsets when actually we’re all investing our real life energy into trying to make real life slightly more tolerable, instead of constantly trying to escape it.

Luckily for us we’ve got some great examples of what to do! Stripe did their best to soften the blow, and even Meta received compliments for Mark essentially saying he effed up big time on his google-glass-2.0 venture. (Though any time a CEO “takes responsibility” its performative because there are 0 consequences for them besides choosing whether or not to give a larger severance… the “taking responsibility” part was laying off 10,000 people? puhleeze)

No matter how small the issue seems, prepare an FAQ document in advance, either for yourself only or to be distributed privately between senior leadership.

When managers have talking points for the most anticipated questions provided to them, they’ll be confident to handle reactions. The result is less uncertainty, less “I don’t know, let me ask about that”, and lessening the impact of the event amongst staff.

Tip: Build the document with your senior staff so that you don’t miss anything.

For layoffs

☎️ Put together a fair package and communicate it early to give people time to gather up their virtual stuff, say goodbye to friends and get contact info.

The playbook for remote and hybrid layoffs is pretty thoroughly covered. If you have decent PR and HR managers, you’ll be able to explain the situation to those losing and keeping their jobs and what resources you’ve made available to them.

Do: Take responsibility by providing a fair package, be transparent about what happened and where the company needs to go next.

Don’t: Be inauthentic, performative, or hide anything.

⌚ As an employee, hopefully you have the option to vet your next employer for long-term outlook as that will affect your future stability as well.

For terminating 1 employee

🧾 Document everything from day 1 with everyone in every meeting no matter what. <— this personal rule has saved my butt so many times I cannot stress how important it is. Taking notes in a shared space with your employees is your insurance against the risk of what I like to call “revisionist history”. From accusations to changing goalposts, your historical documentation of feedback is the only proof you have that this person must be terminated. If you have done your due diligence as a manager (ie. you earnestly tried to augment their training and feedback in order to improve in ways that are material to their job duties) you don’t need to worry about retaliation that isn’t fair.

📣 It’s up to you how you want to announce this to your company. The main rule is to be consistent for each situation and be prepared to provide the context behind why. One option is to only make the announcement to the employee’s immediate teammates, and not the whole company. Typically, this is done immediately after the termination, as your staff is going to notice when someone’s accounts are no longer active. This may seem like virtual hot potato but with HR support it should be feasible: Wait to arrange a virtual meeting for your team during the meeting with your employee, so as their accounts are getting locked, your employees are already scheduled to speak with you immediately afterward.

Do: Recognize the person’s contributions while respecting their privacy and honoring whatever legal agreements are outlined in your contracts. Offer space to your team to ask questions and ease their concerns.

Do not: Gossip, use the word “fired”, speak ill of the person leaving, or provide no explanation.

For an employee leaving under sudden circumstances

⌛ Please please please respect the privacy of anyone leaving for any reason that’s not protected by an NDA. And even if you’re not legally bound to, it’s pretty easy to let things slip. If someone left due to FMLA leave such as for a mental illness or tragedy in their personal life, it’s not better to explain this to their coworkers so they don’t think the person got fired. Simply say, “we can’t disclose why So-and-so needed to leave, but this was the right choice for them and we wish them the best.”

For messing up something internally

Losing a big client or accidentally making everyone’s salaries public or something

🤔 I once made a $20,000 mistake. Except that I didn’t actually make it, someone else did. They pushed the buttons and marked the worksheet and did the thing. But in our all-hands meeting, I faced everyone on video and said, “you guys, I really messed up.”

Take responsibility for the major things that go wrong, because as a leader it’s our job to have ownership over the end results. Perform appreciative inquiry or a “blameless post-mortem” or whatever you’d like to call it, and ask kindly; what happened? How did we solve it? How can we future-proof this process to eliminate risk? Share these findings with the team and then actually follow through on the agreed upon mitigations. The difference between a real apology and a fake apology, is taking the time to genuinely improve upon it.

For messing up something externally

PR nightmares like your CEO does something dumb and now your company needs to make a statement

🛀 Having a real-life, experienced, PR manager that is responsible for your brand reputation is an essential role function for SMBs. Whether these functions are performed by someone else on the team because you can’t afford a dedicated PR manager, or you would prefer to manage the brand response yourself, you must have a plan for when something goes viral for the wrong reasons.

Remember that mean lady from the hipster luggage company whose “drunk with power and mad online” slack messages were leaked? She should have hired a better PR manager and listened to them.

😇 Better yet.. If you can’t just be a good person in general, assume everyone can read everything you ever write online, whether its deep in your email, in a slack DM or on your private twitter handle.

🎓 As you can see the key here is communication. Social media is just too ubiquitous to assume that companies can ever get away with doing bad stuff without some kind of public blowback, even if it’s in a small word-of-mouth circle. Corporations aren’t people, but they’re run by people and employ real humans. Be nice, be transparent, communicate, and be fair.