Business | Opinion
There is no pleasant way of being shown the door
Using euphemisms does very little to soothe those losing their jobs, business psychologists and human resources experts. But it apparently does wonders for the people on the other side of the table.
- By Brooke Masters, Financial Times
- Published: 23:35 December 22, 2008
When is a redundancy not a redundancy? When it is a "change designed to restore profitability" and involves slashing 18 per cent of the workforce, as Jefferies Group did in early December,
The NYSE listed broker is not the only financial services group to resort to euphemisms lately in the face of massive cutbacks.
Credit Suisse recently announced the axeing of 5,300 employees under the breathless headline, "Credit Suisse accelerates implementation of strategic plan".
But it was the head of another Swiss bank, Peter Wuffli, then the president of UBS, who set the standard for obfuscation in February 2003 when he referred to the major cutbacks occasioned by the dotcom crash as "dynamic rightsizing".
The financial services sector is not the only offender, but the enormous scale of redundancies now hitting Wall Street and the City of London draws particular attention to the language that banks, hedge funds and investment companies choose to use.
The Fortress-run Drawbridge Global Macro Fund, for example, recently told its investors that it had "decided to return to an earlier, though more refined, incarnation . . . by addressing our business in uncompromising fashion."
In plain English, they were getting rid of almost everyone except a handful of portfolio managers and three partners.
Using euphemisms does very little to soothe those losing their jobs, business psychologists and human resources experts. But it apparently does wonders for the people on the other side of the table.
"For the people on the receiving end, it makes no difference," said Binna Kandola, a business psychologist.
"The outcome is the same. It softens the blow for the people who are doing it. "If you wrap it up in a larger message, it makes you feel differently.
"It's for the maintenance of your own self-esteem."
The language used to describe job losses may bring out the thesauruses in bulk, but banks also use obfuscatory vocabulary at the beginning of employment contracts.
One potential bank employee was told by a major institution in London that she should view the process of being hired by a bank "as something like gardening.
"Think of yourself as a chrysanthemum. We will do our best to provide the best conditions for transplanting you successfully so that you can replace some of the weeds currently taking up bed space here."
In many ways, the corporate treatment of redundancies most resembles the way polite society handles death. The body in the box is generally said to have departed, or passed on, and mourners are "sorry for your loss."
Interestingly, the bank's chief executive who came across as most direct in the recent cutbacks was also the one who had the worst news to deliver.
At Citigroup's town meeting last month, chief executive Vikram Pandit told employees flat out that headcount had to come down from 352,000 to 300,000 and that roughly 30,000 of them would face "layoffs", the US term for redundancies.
But even he slipped into softer language when talking about the redundancy process, referring to it as "telling a colleague their talent may be needed elsewhere."
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