Christopher J. Dwyer

Try not to read that title aloud in a Jerry Seinfeld voice.

There’s no denying that recessionary fears are resulting in sometimes necessary cost-cutting strategies for businesses across the globe. And there’s no way around budgetary concerns when the economy is still at an unsettled point only three-and-a-half months into 2023. Layoffs are an unfortunate attribute of the corporate arena, in which headcount is reduced in mass quantities as a result of poor performance, market conditions (like we’re experiencing today), a global health crisis (hello, pandemic), and a slew of other reasons.

The world’s biggest and most popular fast-food chain will always weather whatever storm they face, but even McDonald’s has limitations on how they can operate in an uncertain economic climate. Alongside global organizations like Amazon, Goldman Sachs, Meta, Google, etc., the golden arches now faces their turn in the “let’s reduce headcount to save dough” game that so many other enterprises have faced over the past several months.

While layoffs can be heartbreaking and disruptive, they are a cost of business. No one would fault McDonald’s or any other large global entity for slashing their workforce in 2023’s rocky economic road. However, there’s a very, very fine line between a layoff and cruelty…a line that McDonald’s crossed just this past week.

We’re not lovin’ this. At all.

As stated above, yeah, layoffs sometimes need to occur for a business to move forward. Especially in the world we’re living in today. Although costs need to be front-and-center, there’s a right way to conduct layoffs and a completely, erratically wrong way to do so. Guess which way McDonald’s chose?

As reported by The Wall Street Journal:

“In an internal email last week, McDonald’s told U.S. employees and some international staff that they should work from home from Monday through Wednesday so the company could deliver staffing decisions virtually. McDonald’s asked employees to cancel all in-person meetings with vendors and other outside parties at its headquarters.”

McDonald’s U.S. employees were told to work from home for three days and await word on whether or not they would be laid off. Imagine working on a critical project for the fast-food giant; a worker now has the normal, everyday stress of their position while also anxiously anticipating word on whether that position would be cut.

Would anyone be surprised to take a peek at the productivity numbers for those three workdays and notice something off? Ardent Partners and Future of Work Exchange research has found that nearly 75% of businesses are currently experiencing workplace culture issues due to worker anxiety related to economic conditions. And this sentiment was in place before the McDonald’s anti-Future of Work, apathetic display earlier this month. Asking employees to work from home and await a catastrophic decision acutely contributes to this anxiety.

On top of all of this, McDonald’s rolled out sweeping cost-cutting measures (even as the company continues to herald new store openings across the world) such “allowing” employees to keep their jobs with reduced compensation and less bonuses and equity awards. Part of this restructuring also included changes of titles across the organization.

The bottom-line for all of this is all too clear: virtual layoffs, for some organizations, may be a necessity given available resources, however, this is still an area that flies in the face of our Future of Work movement…especially in an age when the candidate experience and the worker experience are supposed to be paramount.

Some may feel that organizations have no choice to deliver layoff news virtually because it’s part of the way we work today, maybe considered a dark side to the remote work boom. Others believe that life-changing news, particularly layoffs, should happen in-person as part of face-to-face meetings.

What’s missing in all of this is the human factor, that sense of empathy and emotional understanding that was such a positive outcome from working under pandemic conditions. Employees will have questions about severance, equipment, and other aspects of their roles; at their core, layoffs are very, very personal conversations that should not occur in a mass environment, let alone virtually.

McDonald’s will unfortunately join fellow corporate giants such as PepsiCo, Twitter, and Google as household brands that drew ire from the world of work for their emotionally-absent layoff methods. Layoffs are a woeful but necessary piece of business today and always, however, they are made much worse when the human factor is completely erased from the process.