Category: Technology Author : Duncan Riley Posted: December 10, 2008
Tags : yahoo
It was a purple letter day at Yahoo today with over 1000 employees being shown the door, but Yahoo couldn’t even manage that properly.
Besides the usual employee twitters and memo leaks, someone also leaked the Yahoo Powerpoint presentation that explained how to gently get rid of employees.
Among the gems from the slides include call center like standard comments on what to say to people as you relieve them from their jobs, corny lines blaming the economic crisis, and more.
Imagine being fired from your job to find that your supervisor or manager cared so little for you they read from a script. Yahoo Sensitivity Epic Fail.
The delightful Yahoo slides as follows (via Valleywag). If you’re completely inept at laying people off, maybe you can use them as well 
Dec 10, 2008
I thought every company read from a script for HR reasons? It's not sensitive, but is it at all unusual?
Dec 11, 2008
It's an odd thing but I thought Yang's email lacked sensitivty too. It's the lack of capital letters. I mean; how much effort does it take to run the memo through a spell checker? If you're going to get rid of someone just before Christmas then go to the effort of pressing the shift key.
His email wasn't leaked, though, it was published on the Yahoo Corp blog: http://ycorpblog.com/2008/12/10/tough-times/
Dec 11, 2008
I disagree – I think this helps make a difficult situation easier for everyone. The person doing the firing probably had nothing to do with the decision on who was getting fired. I think the fact that they put this together shows that they wanted to make sure that their employees were treated with respect, not left up to the various skill levels of their managers. Suddenly, we'd have an episode of The Office.
Dec 11, 2008
Why do they have to call all of their laid-off employees Aaron?
Feb 7, 2009
Having done this, I don't see any issue with the PowerPoint. This ends up being a very difficult process for management who, in many cases, didn't want to let anyone from their team go in the first place. If you are lucky, you get to have some input in which team members are subject to the RIF. In other cases, a brief communication from HR is sent that lets you know people on your team are being let go. Then you get to inform them with little or no preparation. This is more guidance then I received and is very appropriate.