If you ever find, as an HR pro, that you have to send an unfortunate e-mail to senior management about upcoming layoffs, you might want to double, triple and quadruple check the “to” field on the message.
Media agency Carat was struggling and planned a major restructuring of its operations, including layoffs.
Those always awkward conversations with those being let go will be even more awkward because the entire agency received an e-mail regarding the terminations, mistakenly sent by its top HR executive.
And the e-mail didn’t just announce the layoffs; it included PowerPoint and Word documents full of “message” points on how people should be told they’d be out of work.
When the e-mail was sent out my mistake, the IT department pulled it back. But it was apparently too late, because copies were obtained by Advertising Age.
To make matters worse, as is the case too often today, the euphemism “right-sizing” was used in the memos to describe the lay-offs.
Chances are the employees who quickly opened the documents before IT called the e-mail back didn’t consider the possibility of losing their jobs as “right-sized” for them.
There’s no word on one Carat employee’s fate, Chief People Officer Rose Zory, who was responsible for mistakenly sending out the e-mail.
While this is a pretty outrageous e-mail blunder, it won’t be considered the worst one ever having to do with lay-offs. Not long ago, RadioShack dismissed 400 people via e-mail.
Do you have a story about a workplace e-mail blunder, particularly one dealing with HR? Let us know about it by sending us a Comment below.
