How to Announce Layoffs Without Saying Anything (Insider Comms From LinkedIn)

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Yesterday LinkedIn announced they were laying off exactly 563 employees in the R&D department. No concrete reason was given in the memo (below). Rather the co-signers—two leading execs at the social media company—cited “challenging times” and the (cringeworthy) need to “execute on our FY24 plan.”

• Catch up quick: In January Microsoft, LinkedIn’s owner, announced it was cutting 10,000 employees. In July Microsoft let go another 300.

• LinkedIn cut 716 jobs across sales, operations, and support teams in May.

• The layoffs at LinkedIn this week represent 3% of the 20,000-strong company.

Appropriately the memo to employees was sent from Mohak Shroff, an SVP of Engineering, and Tomer Cohen, LinkedIn’s Chief Product Officer. I say appropriate because Shroff and Cohen ultimately oversee the humans affected by this decision.

• As of this writing neither have addressed the layoffs on LinkedIn.

But the memo is 349 words of not much. Corporate speak muffles the bad news and suffocates any elegance in the communication. For example:

This means adapting our organizational structures to improve agility and accountability, establishing unambiguous ownership, and driving improved efficiency & transparency through reduced layering.

• A paragraph with such profound news for 563 employees and their families … and yet so boringly corporate.

• Also, let’s be consistent in choosing to use “and” or the ampersand. Details…

Employees were then subjected to an agonizing 60 minutes as everyone in the R&D department did nothing but stare at Outlook waiting to see if they received a calendar invite titled “Required Attendance: R&D Role Reductions.”

The memo concludes with a head-scratching sentence that reads like it could have been tacked onto the end of a memo expressing grief over the events in Israel and Gaza.

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Here’s the LinkedIn memo: