A sometimes random collection of people made up by a collection of burnt out middle and senior managers that are required to make lists to let go of a certain arbitrary body count or percentage of their departments typically.

You think layoffs actually target the weak employees? Maybe. Sometimes.

Too often it’s the perceived value of the employee to the business, or the idea of keeping key roles and not the talent or dedication of the employee that forms the foundation of decisions.

I’ve seen so much too talent get shown the door because companies don’t know the value of key employees like their peers know their value.

I’ll say this, after layoffs the top people typically start to split, especially in SME and smaller businesses. They start looking as soon as they get wind. So the company ends up with a lot of middling folks, as their best talent splits or burns out trying to catch up the workload and the employees that are the lower productivity but solid daily work grinders already pink slipped. The damage done by this whole culture of layoffs is astonishing.

The math is different for large Enterprises and very prestigious companies. We used to joke about the revolving door at Apple.