- Meta plans to cut more low-performing employees, calling the move “repentant attrition.”
- Companies often use euphemistic language about job cuts to avoid alarming investors and employees.
- However, such wording often fails to soften the impact of cuts on affected workers.
Allow a quick riff on the RIF.
Many companies do their best not to call job cuts for what they are. Whether it’s a “retrenchment,” “entitlement enhancement” or “reorganization,” fancy language doesn’t soften the blow for workers — or hide the reality of lost jobs.
A recent example: Meta said this week that it would mine an additional 5% of what Mark Zuckerberg called “underperformers.” Pretty clear. However, in a later memo from Hillary Champion, Meta’s director of people development enhancement programs, the focus became “forgetfulness not regret.”
On Amazon, a phrase often used for such cuts is “repentant oblivion.”
It’s the kind of language that can attract snark online. After Meta’s announcement, one person wrote on X: “‘No regrettable spoilers’ lmao.”
Meta did not respond to Business Insider’s request for comment.
Steve McClatchy, who consults on leadership and is the author of the book Leadership Relationships, told BI that public companies often use euphemistic language about job cuts to avoid scaring investors and raising concerns that the business is in trouble. But, he said, that effort often fails when they use terms like unrepentant disappointment.
“How sad is that language? It’s trying to say to the ownership group, we’re going in the right direction, not the wrong one,” McClatchy said.
There are many other ways to frame offboarding, error, cuts, errors, workforce adjustments and the need to do this.
For example, news site TechCrunch told BI on Tuesday that it is reducing staff due to “evolving needs.”
It’s possible that for many employers, workforce optimisation, organizational realignment and – for that matter at ChatGPT – internal mobility challenges simply sound better than job cuts.
However, workplace experts told BI, the consequences are the same.
“We’re seeing a lot of companies now go out of their way to avoid using the actual word layoff, even though that’s exactly what they’re doing,” Peter Rahbar, an employment attorney who founded the boutique law firm Rahbar Group, told BI .
A spokesperson for food giant Cargill previously told BI that the job cuts were designed to “realign our talent and resources to align with our strategy”.
Last year, Bumble said it would cut about 30% of its workforce “to better align its operating model with future strategic priorities.”
The hidden messages behind layoff language
Cutting jobs is often bad for morale and can hurt productivity when workers are consumed by worry that they are next. That might be true even with a case like Meta’s, who said he planned to “fill” the roles in 2025. Translation: hire better people, but not you.
However, McClatchy said, to imply that a worker who is pushed out for poor performance is solely to blame misses the responsibility employers have to hire well and that managers should help those under their tutelage do their best. theirs.
“It’s 100% an attack on the employee who has to go and get a job. And what a shame,” he said.
Sandra Sucher, a professor of management practice at Harvard Business School who has studied layoffs, told BI that most conditions for layoffs are designed to make an otherwise negative act seem more positive.
She said companies often use the term bad attrition for good workers who are sorry to see them leave. So a term like unsatisfactory attrition is a way of “covering up” the fact that an employer is letting people go. Linking it to attrition, Sucher said, is meant to imply that employers have a handle on leakage. However, she said, decline is not always something companies can control.
“The bottom line is that you’re not managing it. It’s something that, by and large, happens to you,” she said.
‘It won’t soften the blow’
Rahbar, the lawyer, said employers’ choice of wording when it comes to killing workers has nothing to do with protecting them legally. Instead, he said, it’s mostly a public relations dance and, ultimately, one that does little good.
“If you’re an employee who is affected by this, the language they use to describe it is irrelevant. It’s not going to soften the blow,” Rahbar said.
Ravin Jesuthasan, a co-author of the book “The Skills-Powered Organization” and global leader for transformation services at consulting firm Mercer, told BI that employers have been cutting jobs for more than a century when business falters.
“I don’t know why there was a need to introduce a new language,” he said.
In some cases, the words are not new; they are simply reinstated, reassigned or moved to a new role. In Champion’s memo to Meta, she wrote that the company “was looking to let go” an additional 5% of its workers who had been there long enough to receive a performance review.
“‘Exit’ as in GTFO!” a user X posted.
Not all euphemisms may be as likely to inspire worker cynicism, of course. The practice of evaluating workers based on various metrics and weeding out the worst performers sometimes goes by HR shorthand “rank and rank.”
Corporatespeak can also be a useful way to add levity in uncertain times. A social media user wrote on X what might happen when artificial intelligence emerges to make cuts, oblique tongues in tow.
“Humans will become ‘Unrepentant Deletion’ for AI,” the person wrote.
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