As layoff sweep big-name US companies, young workers who have never seen pink slips are taking to social media to vent, moan and whine.ED JONES/AFP/Getty Images
Gus Carlson is a U.S.-based columnist for The Globe and Mail.
Time was, losing your job was a very private matter, usually shared only with a few close friends and family.
Being laid off, downsized, delayered, rationalized or otherwise dismissed under some HR buzzword was maddening, embarrassing, depressing and ego-denting, so it wasn’t typically something you trumpeted to the world.
Even in the workplace spoof movie Office Space, the three main characters take out their initial frustrations about layoffs at their software company privately – beating the living daylights out of their office printer with a baseball bat in a vacant field.
How times have changed, and not necessarily for the better. As layoffs at big companies such as Google, Dell Inc., Twitter Inc., Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley have topped 100,000 in recent months, that high-pitched whining we hear is employees on social media oversharing their feelings about being terminated.
Many are corporate newbies who have never been handed pink slips and are eager to tell the world how mean companies can be. It is all part of the modern grieving process, which for some reason needs to done in a very public way.
But in the process of publicizing their life’s-not-fair tales of heartbreak, some run the risk of making a bad situation worse. The conduct of laid-off workers on social media – including the emotional urge to diss former employers and how layoffs were handled – may hurt future employment prospects. Sometimes, knowing when to shut up has value.
We shouldn’t be surprised. Take a look at most any social media platform – especially TikTok – and you will find breathtakingly inane narcissistic examples of the selfie generation in its natural habitat. It was only a matter of time before the look-at-me-doing-mundane-things highlight reels became the woe-is-me-I-lost-my-job e-confessionals.
Even on LinkedIn, considered to be the platform for serious career networking, there is grumbling that feels more like it belongs on Glassdoor.com, in which disgruntled employees vent their spleens about all that is wrong with their employers, their bosses and their jobs.
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To be sure, it’s not all vitriol out there. Many laid-off workers use social media to praise their former employers, revel in the experience they gained and express gratitude for the opportunity, even though their days at a company are over.
But with the rash of criticism about how recent mass layoffs have been handled, social media chatter has increasingly included rants about the unfairness of layoff selection processes, poor messaging in announcements and, most often, the impersonal delivery of bad news by e-mail or text. That’s a remarkable complaint from a generation that communicates almost exclusively via iPhone and wants to work remotely.
While much of the criticism may be warranted, what workers say on the way out of one employer has potential impact on the road into another. Companies pay close attention to a candidate’s social media profile, looking for traits such as maturity and resilience that may elevate them above rivals, but also traits that raise red flags about their attitudes toward work.
Most big companies have social media and business privacy policies with tentacles that can reach former employees long after they’ve gone. Ex-workers who persist in badmouthing their former employers may be surprised when they get a call from HR or, in extreme cases, a cease-and-desist letter. These workers can bet their former employers won’t act as positive references in their job searches.
There can be financial implications to a negative postemployment social media campaign, too. Workers who receive severances packages are likely bound by non-disparagement conditions as part of their confidentiality agreements.
That means the company promises it won’t say bad things about the employee if the employee promises not to say bad things about the company. Violating that quid pro quo may put a package at risk.
In the end, while oversharing feelings about relationships, pets or favourite foods is part of the social media mix, laid-off workers should be careful about letting that behaviour drift into work matters, no matter how constructive they think their comments may be.
The bottom line: Think twice before posting. And if you really need to take out your frustrations, whacking a printer a couple of times with a baseball bat may be a useful therapeutic solution.