noted the proportion of respondents who preferred working from home to the office increased between 2020 and 2022.
"I think the reason why people are having such a hard time with it right now and there's been so many reports of negative incidents is because people, for the most part, don't know how to do it with kindness and humanity yet," Vermunt said of online layoffs.Bednar believes companies should take seriously how they terminate people in a virtual world.
Vass Bednar, executive director of McMaster University’s master of public policy in digital society program, isn’t sure digital communication will ever rival the physical version for cues and body language but does note technology is changing layoff scenarios on a number of fronts. "I think firms should be looking at those tools as kind of essentially a write off. And that's part of why you have to think about offboarding ahead of time, because you also want [a plan] from [a] cybersecurity and a privacy perspective if someone's keeping the hardware."Vermunt understands the underlying logic of why companies might risk bad press to maintain a barrier when mass layoffs transpire.
Vermunt tells clients to make sure to look into the camera on their computer to establish eye contact.DurationJoanne Gallop was let go from Canopy Growth through a mass layoff of 200 employees — via the video chat platform Zoom. Illustrations by Chelle Lorenzen. Companies embraced technology to work remotely during the pandemic — now they're using it for layoffs