The "Associated Press" carried a story on Wednesday relating how Radio Shack fired 400 people via e-mail. My first reaction was, "how dehumanizing!" In earlier positions (pre-Gartner), I've had to lay off people and it was never easy, for anyone. A faceless e-mail, to me, would be a cruel way to handle a layoff. A lot of the blogger buzz reinforced that feeling, but as I dug deeper, two other thoughts hit me. First, I might not be getting the whole story. Second, this may not have been as bad a move as it seemed on first glance. It also got me thinking: Is this the start of a trend?

I read a post by someone claiming to have been laid off. He or she had a very different take:

"…this was handled with complete class and respect for all involved. All employees were told three weeks before that layoffs were being planned, and why. They were then told exactly when they were going to take place and how it would be handled. There was a Web site to ask questions. Yes, employees did get e-mails, but how else can you inform? Come up to us in our cubicles? (No offices.) Call on the phone? We did meet with our function heads, and then met in a larger group, where we were told about the benefits, outplacement and an upcoming job fair. I got to say goodbye to friends, walked out on my own and, while I'm sorry to lose the job, I know I was fairly treated. I'd like you to show me a better process than that. Shame on the Fort Worth paper for making it seem like this was some heartless act."

I haven't called Radio Shack to find out the facts of the matter, but there are some hints in the AP story that support the details in the blog post.

Then, I began to wonder if the detailed process — properly executed — might not be totally acceptable in our "new society," particularly among people far younger than me (I'm 57); people who post, for example, intimate details on MySpace.com or personal pictures (on riya.com). Parenthetically, Riya.com is scary. Per Douglas Rushkoff's article in "Discover" magazine: "Tag enough pictures of yourself or a loved one and the site can then identify those faces when they show up in photos anyone else puts online. Just roll your cursor over a face and Riya will tell you who it is." In its first seven weeks of existence, people uploaded more than 7 million pictures to Riya.com.

So, maybe we are going to see more companies follow the same process that Radio Shack followed — including the e-mail layoff notices.

What do you think? Have you seen firms doing this? If this trend takes off, what else might we expect to see happen?

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This example is not the only example of "leveraging" technology to terminate employees. Yahoo! News (http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp...) had a story about a worker in the U.K. who was terminated via a text message by her employer, Blue Banana. As technology-enabled communications become more accepted, we will see businesses start to use them more frequently. The Blue Banana example was a poor use of the technology (there was no other communication to the employee). The Radio Shack example was a more appropriate use of the technology, because it was not the only channel of communication used for a difficult event. Any communication mechanism, whether technology-enabled or not, is only as effective as the communicator and the message.

When we are ok with receiving job offers and promotion letters by email, why not lay offs? But email alone without any other pre preparations would have been in poor taste. But in this case what RS has done is in sync with changing times. However, email lay offs are a thing of the past, didn't we hear of pink mails (the electronic equivalent of pink slips)during the dot com bust? I'm more interested to know of the fashion of lay offs in the future.