Human resources

[what I believe to be the Twitter HQ in San Franscisco at the corner of Market and Polk. Not particularly grand or flashy, rather repurposed from another era. But it is more flashy inside: see reference 3]

I read this morning that over Thursday and Friday just past, Twitter's new owner looks to have sacked around half the workforce of around 7,500, with notifications going out on Thursday and access to corporate IT facilities being withdrawn on Friday. He has also cleared out the senior management team and brought in a small number of his own people to provide a bit of muscle at the top of the heap, rather in the way that senior ministers in UK governments have taken to having a cabal of senior advisors, answerable to them alone and outside the civil service hierarchy. All of which leads me to wonder about the mechanics of layoffs on such a large scale.

To be fair, those who have been sacked have been given three months' severance pay. They get a few weeks to find themselves new jobs. But I dare say after that, public funds are not dished out on the scale which is normal for the slackers and idlers of Europe.

Did he outsource the unpleasant business of getting rid of people to an outside contractor? I believe there are HR companies which specialise in providing services of this sort. Do these services include provision of a team of security people to escort people off the premises with their brown cardboard boxes?

Where do you go when you want 3,750 brown cardboard boxes in a hurry?

What do you do about space? Do you pull the survivors into blocks of more or less fully occupied space and then unload the balance? How much of that space is on long leases which cannot quickly be unwound? And if the pictures at reference 3 are anything to go by, Twitter might have bought into what was a depressed part of town in San Fransisco, but they have spent plenty on décor. A free spending style which will no doubt be reined back. From where I associate to the rather flashy Microsoft offices in Reading, back at the beginning of the century. Maybe the suits have moved in there too.

What about other resources which are head count dependant? All those central services for which demand will now be much reduced. Maybe the very same IT people who organised all the terminating emails? Or did the new leader and his advisors sweat a spreadsheet all night and do it themselves?

How do you maintain business continuity while all this is going on? How do you keep the service running? How do you maintain the cash flow from the big advertisers? Which makes me think of cutting a division in half at the same time as it is supposed to be manning the trenches for an assault on its position.

What about the WARN of reference 2 which was intended to provide workers with a degree of protection in situations of this sort? Although I dare say the people who originally promoted the act were thinking more of blue collar jobs in factories closing down in favour of buying in cheap from abroad than of well paid white collar types in silicon valleys.

All very interesting. No doubt another case study for MBA students in years to come.

References

Reference 1: Twitter job cuts begin as Musk warns of ‘massive’ revenue drop: Brands including GM, VW, General Mills and Carlsberg pause advertising on the platform - Hannah Murphy, San Francisco, Tim Bradshaw, FT - 2022.

Reference 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_Adjustment_and_Retraining_Notification_Act_of_1988.

Reference 3: https://www.businessinsider.com/photos-twitter-office-hq-in-san-francisco-2014-4?r=US&IR=T.