When to announce bad news?

I used to work in a corporation that had the habit of announcing major layoffs during the first week of July. Unfortunately, that happened to be the same time when the majority of the local workforce started their summer holidays. For several years I got used to listening to the info calls and updating my CV from the summer cottage or by the swimming pool. The kids were playing and I was pretending that everything is ok while at the same time wondering if I and my colleagues would still have jobs in a few weeks.

From the employee’s point of view, the timing was the most horrible one. It ruined our holidays and left us dealing with the bad news alone, without any support from our co-workers. When I left the corporate world and started building my own company, it was self-evident to me that I would always do the opposite.

If you need to announce some bad news, always make the announcement during the early part of the week, never just before the holidays, and never just before the weekend.

It is important that employees get support from each other, and that they can deal with the news during work time instead of holidays.

I know that not everyone agrees. A CEO I know just recently said that he would always announce bad news on a Friday or just before holidays to “give people a chance to settle to the news in peace”. I am not sure if he believed that this would really benefit the employees or if he was just thinking that this way the minimum amount of work time would be wasted. Either way, I hope that these kinds of outdated management practices are soon history.