Microsoft is reportedly offering voluntary buyout opportunities to 60,000 employees. After previously offering buyouts to encourage early retirements, the company is now pivoting to pre-retirement employees so the “organizations” within the company can “adapt their workforce to changing needs”.
■ Will Microsoft actually let a full 60,000 people go? That seems completely unlikely. But 60,000 remains an enormous number of people to be told “We might or might not continue to employ you long-term, so think really hard about whether you want to keep counting on this paycheck.” There is some serious destabilization potential embedded in what the message implies.
■ It could, of course, be a good thing for the broader economy if highly-skilled people are given the opportunity to have a soft landing from good jobs that may no longer be economical -- a good severance package can provide some tremendous seed capital for an innovative startup, and the free market thrives on certain forms of creative destruction.
■ But we also shouldn’t make any mistake about the potentially disruptive signal this sends: Microsoft is a top-20 member of the Fortune 500, and if it’s retrenching, others could easily be ready to follow. And big workforce reductions often come in clusters because there’s a sort of permission structure that gets activated once a big company takes the initial heat. CEOs like to think of themselves as independent heroes, but they’re often nothing more than herd animals.
