Our strategy for COVID-19 layoffs
I’m the CEO of a restaurant tech company called 7shifts. In short, we help operators simplify labor management and improve performance for restaurants, allowing them to take advantage of core functions like predictive scheduling, time & attendance, messaging, and engagement tools.
With COVID-19 disrupting businesses around the world, it has forced many high-growth tech companies to freeze hiring and temporarily lay off portions of their workforce in order to make it through this particularly challenging time. Our business is no exception.
To shed some light on the impact we’re seeing firsthand here in Canada: over 1 million Canadians (~3% of the population) have applied for unemployment benefits in the past month. The country already had 1.5 million people on employment insurance (EI) prior to COVID-19 hitting. In a month, our unemployment population has effectively doubled.
With governments around the world enforcing necessary social distancing measures to curb the spread of the virus, it has forced restaurants to close down. This has put our restaurant customers and our company in a tough spot. As restaurants started shutting their doors at an alarming rate, we felt the blow in real time.
When this began happening, our leadership team and I started meeting daily. We were furiously examining the data from within our platform and comparing it to what we were seeing in the market. We were thoroughly analyzing it, creating insights, and meeting with our board on a regular basis to come up with a plan.
On Monday, March 30th, we came to the realization that we had no choice but to temporarily lay off 25% of our company. This was the most gut wrenching thing I’ve had to do since starting 7shifts in 2014. I never imagined we’d find ourselves encountering a scenario like this. Even though several other tech companies had already gone through with announcing layoffs, it didn’t make the decisions sting any less.
Prior to the layoffs happening, the team and I spent countless hours drafting the process we’d follow in order to temporarily lay off team members remotely. There are several operational things to consider, but the thing that was top of mind for me was our people. Without the trust and support of our people, we have nothing. One of our core values is “Make every experience an 11”, which essentially means going above and beyond the call of duty for customers and our peers. While it’s not exactly a positive experience to be laid off, we live by our values and if there was a time to demonstrate this value, it was now. If our process wasn’t followed, communication wasn’t clear, or if we were not transparent, then we would have done wrong by our people and it’s something we would feel the impacts of long after COVID-19 passes.
I know many CEOs and founders will be going through this same process in the weeks to come, so I wanted to offer my support and share the strategy document that we put together as a leadership team. It outlines the timing of events, the operational tools used, messaging, FAQ, and more. This document is meant to be a starting point for leaders and other founders that have to go through the unfortunate event of layoffs due to the impact of COVID-19. I encourage you to make it your own to fit the narrative and culture of your business.
I sincerely hope you don’t have to go through this, but if you do, then it might be useful to at least browse through our strategy document. Alternatively, if you know another CEO or founder that has to go through this, please feel free to pass the link on to them.
There is light at the end of the tunnel — hang in there.
If you have any questions, please drop me an email to jordan@7shifts.com.
Thank you and stay safe.
