- Meta plans to cut more low-performing employees, calling the move “non-regrettable attrition.”
- Companies often use euphemistic language for job cuts to avoid alarming investors and employees.
- Yet such phrasing doesn’t often soften the impact of cuts on affected workers.
Allow for a quick riff on RIFs.
Many companies go out of their way to avoid calling job cuts what they are. Whether it’s a “reduction in force” (RIF), “rightsizing,” or “streamlining,” the fancy language doesn’t soften the blow for workers — or hide the reality of lost jobs.
One recent example: Meta said this week it would push out an additional 5% of what Mark Zuckerberg called “low-performers.” Clear enough. Yet, in a subsequent memo from Hillary Champion, Meta’s director of people development growth programs, the focus became “non-regrettable attrition.”
At Amazon, a phrase often used for such cuts is “unregretted attrition.”
It’s the type of language that can draw snark online. Following Meta’s announcement, one person wrote on X, “‘Non-regrettable attrition’ lmao.'”
Meta didn’t respond to a request for comment from BI.
Steve McClatchy, who consults on leadership and is the author of the book “Leading Relationships,” told Business Insider that public companies often use euphemistic language around job cuts to try to avoid spooking investors and raising concerns that the business is in trouble. But, he said, that effort often falls flat when they use terms like non-regrettable attrition.
“How sad is that language? It’s trying to say to the ownership group, we’re headed in the right direction, not the wrong one,” McClatchy said.
There are numerous other ways to frame offboarding, err, cutbacks, errr, workforce adjustments, and the need to do so.
For example, the news site TechCrunch told BI on Tuesday it’s reducing staff because of “evolving needs.”
It’s possible that for many employers, workforce optimization, organizational realignment, and — shout out to ChatGPT for this one — internal mobility challenges just sound better than job cuts.
Yet, workplace experts told BI, the fallout is the same.
“We’re seeing a lot of companies now do everything not to use the actual word layoff, even though that’s exactly what they’re doing,” Peter Rahbar, an employment attorney who founded the boutique law firm the Rahbar Group, told BI.
A spokesperson for the food giant Cargill previously told BI that job cuts were designed to “realign our talent and resources to align with our strategy.”
In 2024, Bumble said it would be cutting about 30% of its workforce “to better align its operating model with future strategic priorities.”
The hidden messages behind layoff language
Cutting jobs is often bad for morale and can hurt productivity when workers become consumed with worrying they’re next. That can be true even with a case like that of Meta, which said it plans to “backfill” roles in 2025. Translation: hire better people — though not you.
Yet, McClatchy said, to imply that a worker who gets pushed out for poor performance is solely at fault misses the responsibility that employers have to make good hires and that managers have to help those under their tutelage perform their best.
“It’s 100% an attack on the employee that has to go then find a job. And what a shame that is,” he said.
Sandra Sucher, a professor of management practice at Harvard Business School who has studied layoffs, told BI that most terms for layoffs are designed to make an otherwise negative act appear more positive.
She said companies often use the term regrettable attrition for good workers they’re sorry to see leave. So, a term like non-regrettable attrition is a way of “sugarcoating” the fact that an employer is letting people go. Connecting it to attrition is meant, Sucher said, to imply that employers have a handle on the outflow. Yet, she said, attrition isn’t always something companies can control.
“The point of attrition is that you’re not managing it. It’s something that, by and large, happens to you,” she said.
‘It’s not going to soften the blow’
Rahbar, the attorney, said that employers’ choice of wording when it comes to culling workers isn’t about protecting themselves legally. Instead, he said, it’s mostly a PR dance and, ultimately, one that does little good.
“If you’re an employee who is impacted by this, the language they’re using to describe it is irrelevant. It’s not going to soften the blow,” Rahbar said.
Ravin Jesuthasan, a coauthor of the book “The Skills-Powered Organization” and the global leader for transformation services at the consulting firm Mercer, told BI that employers have been cutting jobs for more than a century when business falters.
“I don’t know why there was a need to introduce new language,” he said.
In some cases, the words aren’t new; they’re just redeployed, reassigned, or transitioned to a new role. In Champion’s memo at Meta, she wrote that the company is “aiming to exit” an additional 5% of its workers who’ve been around long enough to get a performance rating.
“‘Exit’ as in GTFO!” one X user posted.
Not all euphemisms might be as likely to whip up worker cynicism, of course. The practice of scoring workers based on various metrics and getting rid of the worst performers sometimes goes by the HR shorthand “rank and yank.”
Corporatespeak can also be a handy way to add levity in uncertain times. One social media user wrote on X about what might happen when artificial intelligence shows up to make cutbacks, oblique language in tow.
“Humans will become ‘Non-Regrettable Attrition’ for AI,” the person wrote.
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