Tesla Started Laying Off 14,000 Employees. It Couldn’t Have Gone Worse

Tesla Started Laying Off 14,000 Employees. It Couldn’t Have Gone Worse

How you handle layoffs says a lot about what you value as a leader.

We should start by acknowledging there is no good way to lay off 14,000 people. I mean, there isn’t really a great way to lay off even a small number of people, though the logistics are certainly easier to manage. My point is that layoffs are inherently traumatic, no matter how a company handles them.

There are, however, less terrible ways to go about the painful process of letting people know they will no longer have a job. You can communicate personally with employees, you can demonstrate empathy, and you can provide assistance to affected employees to ensure that the experience is a little less painful.

On Monday, Tesla sent an email to employees saying it was laying off around 10 percent of its workforce, or roughly 14,000 people. On Tuesday, affected employees found out they no longer had a job. The whole thing went about as poorly as you might expect for a company that sometimes seems to operate at the whims of its mercurial CEO, Elon Musk.

According to various reports, employees received emails overnight notifying them they were laid off. Some of those employees were currently working a night shift when the notice arrived. Others didn’t see the email and showed up for work, only to discover they had lost their job when their security badge wouldn’t scan and they were turned away at the gate.

For example, a local Fox station spoke with employees at the company’s Texas Gigafactory. One of them described the way they found out they lost their job. “I was literally standing outside trying to figure out why my badge wasn’t working. Why is it that I can’t log in?” said the employee. “Come to find out I was laid off.”

Employees also shared the email they received notifying them they were laid off. According to the email, the company did “a thorough review of the organization and made the difficult decision to reduce our headcount globally. Unfortunately, as a result, your position has been eliminated by this restructuring.”

I think we can all agree that having employees show up to work only to be sent home because they no longer have a job is a pretty bad way to handle anything. It shows an enormous lack of basic leadership skills like planning and, well, empathy.

Here’s the thing–from the company’s perspective, I’m sure this all makes sense. It’s not all that different from how one of Musk’s other companies, known at the time as Twitter, laid off employees. Musk doesn’t seem to give a lot of consideration to how his decisions affect his employees–only to how they affect the business and him personally.

Tesla would argue it’s doing the right thing because–in many cases–it’s paying employees through June 15, which is 60 days from the date of the notice. That might comply with the law, but at some point, it’s not only about whether you’re complying with the law–it’s about doing the right thing.

Look, losing your job is traumatic. It just is. You make plans for your life based on the idea that you’re going to go to work, do your job, and get paid. You count on your job to provide you with an income so that you can pay rent, buy food, and maybe even go on vacation.

The moment you find out you no longer have a job, all of that becomes uncertain. All of those plans are placed with anxiety, fear, and doubt. The way Tesla is handling these layoffs is only amplifying the trauma by handling things in such a chaotic way.

To be fair, Tesla makes–in general–very good cars. I’ve driven a Model S for years, and it’s the most fun vehicle I’ve ever driven. It isn’t perfect, and the company is known for regularly having production issues, but it would be hard to argue that it hasn’t been incredibly successful at selling electric vehicles.

My point is that I’m not just picking on Tesla. But, none of that changes the fact that it’s handling this terribly. Part of the reason I make that argument is that layoffs like this are always the fault of the leader. If you find yourself having to let go of that many people, it’s because you are doing something wrong. Of course, the leader isn’t the one being laid off.

In Tesla’s case, it bet that its growth would continue, so it built factories and hired employees. Now, however, things are rough. The company missed delivery estimates and has had a hard time with the launch of its latest vehicle, the CyberTruck. In addition, there are reports that its low-cost EV, the Model 2, has been canceled altogether (though Musk has disputed that report).

Tesla probably needed to reduce costs, and layoffs are the quickest way for any company to do that. And, layoffs are always going to be painful–especially for those who lose their jobs. I just think it’s possible to do it better than this.

This post originally appeared at inc.com.

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