I'm recording this Tuesday, April fifteenth, twenty twenty five, Tax Day day, where we pay the government to provide services, to protect and defend, to provide for the common defense and the general welfare, and a lot of us are questioning that lately, and in the continuing spirit of our week of citizen ing with these short stories. Today's story has a lot to do with money in hard times, which I'm not bringing up for any particular reason, just
apropos of nothing. But let's say that there's hard times and a company or organization has to let people go. What's the best way to do that? Uh. John Alexander, who I'm partnered with on this, shared this thought with me as he prepared to launch today's story that it's in the toughest of times that the thesis that all of us are smarter than any of us and can achieve better things together than we can alone, that's when
the point is really proven. And so the story we're sharing today is about layoffs that are done in a group way, where the whole organization helps a company figure out how to cut its costs, and if layoffs are required, who gets let go. It sounds radical, It sounds and we're so used to like the burden of the leader that has to go. We've seen these videos of CEOs crying after they've laid off half their staff on Zoom.
They don't have to bear it alone. There is another way to do it, and they can share that burden and that opportunity to lead with the people. You can citizen even in a spa es actually in the darkest times with the toughest decisions. So please listen to this. As I've said in the other of these mini drops, the visuals for these are available on Instagram, my instagram, Baratunde or how to Citizen or the Citizens Guy, and
I'm also cataloging these on substack. We don't have a how to Citizen substack, which is my personal one newsletter dot baritunda dot com. So the show notes for this will have a link to the visual for this story, and I'll make sure that the show notes for the
previous ones are also doing the same. But on the chant that you don't want to click on a Mark Zuckerberg property, we'll find another archival location for it, may end up being substack, And yeah, let us know what you think about all this and head over to stories dot howdositizen dot com in order to sign up for the emails where we're releasing these every day. We have a little form and we're asking you, do you know stories like this? Are you a part of stories like this?
Do you want to hear more stories like this? And we will take appropriate action together? How about that? All right? In the meantime, check out these consent based layoffs. Radical beautiful.
Layoffs are a really complicated and charged topic. It can be incredibly dehumanizing depending on how you go about it for everybody involved, and it can also not be My name is Kate Sase Sassoon, and I'm a consultant who generally helps any organization that's trying to co own or co operate some kind of shared asset do it together better. We looked at each other and said, oh, we're going to have to cut the budget, which means we're going
to have to fire our friends. I wanted to provide a different pathway forward, so I presented to them the idea that we could and probably should do this in a participatory fashion. We need to consult with every single member in the organization. What we need from everybody is what is your red, yellow, and green in terms of money and capacity, and we're going to see if we can make those numbers plus our financial productions match. And
so we sat down, we looked at the math. Some people went down in pay but then got a commission, and some people went on a month by month contract. We actually only had to completely let go of four people. They felt like more complete, full humans. They felt respected, they felt seen, they felt heard. Everybody had a strong voice in how the company collectively faced a financial shortfall.
I think that the concept of hey, you could involve your team in your layoffs is absolutely replicable across every single kind of organization. It doesn't have to strip you of your bond with these people and with the work.