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Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky reveals a major regret involving letter He wrote a letter to employees who were laid off in 2020.
In a recent interview on the show “Rethinking” podcastChesky said he had to change the company’s messaging after writing in the letter that he had “deep love” for the 1,900 employees he laid off during the coronavirus pandemic.
“I used the word ‘love’ because that’s what I felt at the time,” Chesky said. “I wrote it very quickly. I didn’t have a lot of time, so I wrote down how I felt, and it was very emotional. The company is not a family. In fact, we had to make that transition. We used to call ourselves a family, and then we did have to fire people or they had to leave the company, and yes, you don’t fire your family.”
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He also claimed that he chose to use emotional language in his letter after noticing other companies writing “inhumane” redundancy notices.
“I basically looked at a bunch of people who had written layoff letters, and I noticed something dehumanizing about the way companies were doing layoffs,” Chesky said. “It felt like the letter wasn’t written by a human. It felt like an AI prompt or something. The AI was more empathetic than most layoff letters, and I think the end result is that CEOs have become very risk-averse. They’re not being vulnerable, they’re afraid to say the wrong thing. They don’t mean what they say. The lawyers and the HR people and everyone is covering up what they say.”
In 2020, due to the epidemic, a large number of businesses closed down, and the number of unemployed people hit a record high. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, in the fourth quarter of 2020, 10.8 million 9 million more people were unemployed than were reported at the end of 2019.
Affected by the epidemic, layoffs continued to spread after 2020. After several companies failed to lay off employees, the way companies lay off employees began to receive close attention.
In December 2021, Better.com CEO Vishal Garg fired around 900 employees via a Zoom call, but his method of firing was met with backlash.
“If you were on this call, you are part of the unfortunate group that was fired,” Garg said on the call. CNN“Your employment is terminated immediately.”
Later Apologize In a letter to staff, he criticised his handling of the redundancies, claiming he had failed to show “appropriate respect and appreciation” to departing employees.
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Recently, Tesla e-mail The company sent notices to a group of employees (who appeared to require work accommodations for people with disabilities) stating that they were being laid off due to recent business changes and a lack of other positions for which they were qualified.
The email differed from traditional layoff emails in that it did not thank the employee for their time with the company or wish them well in the future.
The way a company lays off employees can have a significant impact on how much trust the remaining employees have in the company. Polls In a survey by professional services firm PwC, 55% of employees surveyed said their trust was damaged by the way their company laid off employees. Additionally, 57% of employees said that more transparency from executives about the reasons for layoffs would help build trust in the company.
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This article was originally published on June 4, 2024, 8:33 pm.
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