This case sounds like an unfortunate mistake, I’m sure they intended to present the material in a somber manner. That said, it begs the question on if what should be expected behind closed doors.
The tone of the presentation is far less important than the tone in the minds of the people doing the presenting. You can present as somberly as you want, but if a laugh track is secretly playing inside their heads, they can fuck all the way off. Workers deserve actual compassion, not the facade of it.
Which OP sort of implied the sentence right after.
I'm pretty sure if most people heard the discussions that go on in management meetings, especially at high levels, they'd be pretty irate. I've been in a few at different organizations and I don't have the moral flexibility to treat people like disposable garbage our sociopathic business 'leaders' have. Most people suspect this is the case but are satisfied to hear PR lies--as long as the message isn't offensive (which I don't understand why, I prefer direct messaging so we can cut the BS).
We need a serious social revolution in labor rights and expectations in this country. Not sure if its a really bad or good time for it but I think its one of the two.
I don't have that experience, but my suspicion is that the cartoon bosses in peoples' heads might not be an accurate picture of actual bosses? Laying people off doesn't seem to be easy for most managers, or at least those who talk about it.
And even then, the only person who fully knows the real you... is yourself.
"Last links post I included tech company Triplebyte in the shame list for refusing to let employees switch to work-from-home, then firing them. A representative of Triplebyte contacted me and asked me to explain their perspective, which is that they took the pandemic seriously and went all-remote around the same time as everyone else. The reluctance to let employees switch to work-from-home applied only to a few employees in early March, before the scale of the crisis was widely appreciated, and they say that they would have tried to make accommodations if they had understood the seriousness of the requests. They had been planning the downsizing for a while, it was really unlucky that it ended up in the middle of a pandemic, and they tried to make it as painless as possible by offering good severance pay, etc. I’m relaying their statement because I’m realizing it was probably unfair of me to single them out in particular – my hearing a lot about this was downstream of my having a lot of friends who work(ed) for Triplebyte, and my having a lot of friends who work(ed) for Triplebyte was downstream of them being a great company doing important work which all my friends wanted to work for. I continue to generally respect them and their vision (see here for more), and you don’t need to give them any more grief over it than they’re already getting."
>The rumor is that it had planned the downsizing for a while, wanted the employees to be in the office to hear about it in person, and didn’t care how much risk it had to expose the soon-to-be-ex-employees to in order to make it happen.
i.e. making them come in to the office for the layoff notice, after it was known the public needs to social-distance and minimize gatherings.
That part is still bad, and it's not retracted, nor does Triplebyte dispute making them come in to the office to be informed of the layoffs.
In any case, it would be nice if he updated the original post with a link to the retraction, otherwise people won't see any unringing of the bell when they go back to that link.
If I learned that the accidentally visible filename of the PowerPoint in that meeting was “EjectorSeat.pptx”, I’d be some combination of angry and alarmed about management’s attitude. That would be a definite “update my resume and call up some former colleagues for lunch” kind of moment at the very least.
I think people reasonably expect that when a company makes a serious decision that affects hundreds of people’s livelihoods, that they effect a pretty somber tone.