Why are companies getting worse at letting employees go?
Last week’s jobs numbers in the US may have shown a drop in the number of pink slips hitting workers’ desks in May, but don’t be fooled: Layoffs are alive and well in 2025. In the first half of the year, employers in America let go of nearly 745,000 people, according to outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. That’s the second-highest number for the period since 2009—surpassed only by the first six months of 2020, when covid essentially shut down the global economy.
The cuts are part of a broader trend. About 20% of S&P 500 companies have fewer employees today than they did a decade ago, according to a recent Wall Street Journal analysis.
Yet, even after having had years of practice slashing payrolls, most companies are still shockingly bad at it. In fact, it is the frequency and volume of workforce cuts that seem to be making them even worse. Normalizing the practice has ended up sucking the humanity right out of it.
Also Read: Layoffs are painfully often a cover for corporate foibles
Case in point: Dating app Bumble, which last week announced that it was laying off 240 employees—that’s 30% of its workforce. Employees received the news via video call and responded with thumbs-down emojis.
In response to their reaction, founder and chief executive officer Whitney Wolfe Herd told them, “Y’all need to calm down.” To make matters worse, she added, “Everyone’s going to have to be adults in dealing with this.” I’m not sure what kind of response Wolfe Herd expected.
A thumbs down is a much more work-appropriate alternative to the digit they could have thrown her way—especially considering what we know about the impact layoffs have on both those let go and those left behind. (My colleague Sarah Green Carmichael has written extensively on these detrimental effects.)
Also last week, executives at Microsoft showed their own flavour of callousness when they announced that they would lay off 9,000 workers. That’s on top of the 6,000 the company laid off in May.
That Microsoft could not figure out the total number it would need to cut just two months earlier suggests both sloppiness and thoughtlessness. Layoff survivors will now live in a constant state of anxiety that additional downsizing could be right around the corner.
Artificial intelligence (AI) has only made matters worse. It has become a justification for layoffs, while simultaneously letting companies outsource the work of empathy to a large language model.
Also Read: Mass layoffs in Big Tech are an old-guard mistake
An executive producer with Microsoft’s Xbox, which was heavily impacted by the cuts, wrote a LinkedIn post offering some AI prompts that would “help reduce the emotional and cognitive load that comes with job loss.” He has since deleted the post.
Microsoft pointed out the most recently announced cuts are less than 4% of the company’s total workforce. That’s still thousands of people and is the kind of justification that Harvard Business School professor Sandra Sucher sees as an increase in “moral disengagement” on the part of CEOs. She told me that big bosses have become so far removed from the average employee that they “don’t seem to understand what it means for someone to lose their job.” Layoffs are increasingly “stripped of any acknowledgement that harm is being done,” she added.
It’s the layoff edition of a broader phenomenon I have been following among America’s CEOs: The end of the era of corporate do-gooderism and make-the-world-a-better-place discourse.
Empathetic leadership, all the rage during the covid era, is not part of the conversation anymore. And the lack of respect that employees have subsequently felt from their employers is accelerating a crisis of trust in big business.
Also Read: American employees have lost their post-pandemic leverage in the labour market
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has come to embody this leadership transformation. In 2022, when the company cut 11,000 employees, Zuckerberg—as was the practice of many business leaders at the time—took accountability for some poor decision making. “I know this is tough for everyone, and I’m especially sorry to those impacted,” he had said back then.
Fast forward to January 2025, when Zuckerberg said he was cutting about 5% of staff by moving out “low-performers.” The blame had been shifted. There was no acknowledgement of what such a public statement might mean for the future job hunts of those impacted, and certainly no “I’m sorry.” As Zuckerberg has said, he is done apologizing.
Layoffs are a reality of corporate America today, and they’re not going away. But that doesn’t mean they need to be cruel. As Sucher told me, companies preparing for a cut should have a mantra: Do it for the right reason, in the right way. ©Bloomberg
The author is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering corporate America.
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