Oracle Laid Off Thousands by Email—and That May Have Been the Right Call

Laying off thousands by email looks cold, but it may be the only workable approach.

EXPERT OPINION BY SUZANNE LUCAS, HUMAN RESOURCES CONSULTANT, EVIL HR LADY @REALEVILHRLADY

Oracle office in Hong Kong. Photo: Getty Images

Oracle laid off thousands of employees yesterday. Numbers vary, with some reports saying up to 30,000 employees. Regardless, they conducted the mass termination via email. Employees received notification early Tuesday morning, and many of them were not happy. 

Writing at the subreddit, r/employeesofOracle, one former employee wrote:

“I was with Oracle for 26 years, and got the email at 6am. That they didn’t bother to do a phone call is disgusting, cowardly, and just plain ugly.”

It does seem disgusting, cowardly, and just plain ugly to not even have the compassion to tell employees face-to-face that their livelihood was being yanked out from underneath them. It removes human interaction at a time that is emotionally and financially devastating. But terminations at this scale are a logistics problem just as much as they are a human problem. These technical and coordination issues change what good looks like.

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When email notifications are appropriate

If Oracle laid off 10 people, or even 1,000 people, doing face-to-face meetings with affected employees would be the best way to handle it. These are people’s lives, and while they may be represented by numbers in a spreadsheet, these are humans with feelings.

One of a manager’s jobs is to handle hard tasks, like terminations, and I firmly believe notifying people that “today is your last working day” is one of those tasks.

But with affected employees in the tens of thousands, coordinating to notify everyone on the same day in individual meetings would have been insurmountable. Group notifications were the only way to accomplish this. You could either do it via group video meetings or via email.

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