Craig Notes

Yep, there are some pretty creative ways to show someone the door. We looked to question-and-answer site Quora to find the most creative euphemisms for layoffs. This is what respondents had to say.

Downright rude

It’s never easy to hear that you’ve been let go, nor is it easy for most managers to be the bearer of the bad news. But some have more tact than others.

“One of my dad's friends said to a guy: ‘I don't know how this office would run without you! But as of Monday, I'm going to find out’,” wrote Tracey Bryan.

Equally insensitive, wrote Richard Brasser, is a line used periodically by a business owner he knows: “I had to shoot another hostage today. The team was getting a little complacent.”

And when John Bagnall lost his job at EMI Records, he was told, “ ‘We’ve decided your outlook and talents are ideally suited to the freelance sector’,” he wrote.

Beware the dreaded “ized”

To soften the blow, some managers avoid the dreaded “downsize” but use its particular construction.  Take “rightsized,” for example. “Rightsizing" wrote Robert Rapplean, is “a way of avoiding saying ‘downsizing.’ When the managers would hold onto their jobs by laying off all of the actual workers, we would call that ‘capsizing.’

Lorna Hughes knows a friend who was “told she'd been let go because the company was being ‘smartsized, which seem especially cruel,” she wrote. “Not only are they firing you but they're telling you they're smart to do so.”

Richard Careaga recalls he first “synergised” and then “graduated” when his company was absorbed by a bigger player. “It was one of those all of a sudden things where me and my 50,000 buddies were swallowed up by our new 250,000 friends,” he wrote. “In an organisation that big all you can hope to control (at least temporarily) is headcount and for the most part the guys at former [headquarters] were a bucket of unsorted spare parts to unneeded machinery. Still, it stung.”

And when Nortel Networks experienced mass layoffs in 2001, the company “did not rightsize, downsize, or smartsize anyone,” wrote Troy Turner, then a manager at the company. “Nortel ‘OPTIMISED’ 65,000 people!  (Yes, that included me and all my peers, our bosses, and even their bosses, & their.... )”

Deciphering corporate jibberish

When in doubt as to what to say, some mangers just defer to corporate jargon. “My favourite,” wrote Andy Micone, “was ‘realigning our resources to our corporate strategy.’ That's right, they told people that they ‘weren't being laid off’ but were simply ‘no longer in alignment.’  If you felt like a cog in a corporate machine yesterday...”

Meanwhile, George Andre said he’s heard a fair share of convoluted euphemisms, including "recycling our creative pool,” “maximising our throughput by streamlining our workforce” and “rethinking our future,” he wrote.

Out with a quack

Even when employers try to be diplomatic, layoffs can foster home-grown euphemisms, where the employees themselves coin a term for job cuts.

At one Fortune 500 company, a manager was known for walking up to people “seemingly at random and say ‘You doing anything this afternoon? I have some stuff I want to chat with you about. Let’s go take a walk around the duck pond,” Micone wrote. “We noticed people leaving to go for a walk with this manager would never return. Soon the catch-phrase for layoffs … was ‘a walk around the duck pond.’”

Courtesy: BBC Capital