Layoffs are hard enough. Don't let state filings carry the message.
For the person who loses a job, a layoff can be devastating. For the company, it is sometimes what the business requires. Both are true, and that is what makes layoffs so hard to discuss. It is also why I think they are worth examining.
Layoffs are also common. In June, Gallup reported that the share of U.S. employees saying their employer is letting people go "held steady in the first quarter of 2026 at about 21%." That is about one U.S. employee in five reporting cuts at their own employer.
How a layoff is delivered can become the story. The Chicago Tribune reported that an office-products wholesaler "summarily dismissed hundreds of employees" in a mass video call, five weeks before the date in its own notice. The Illinois Department of Labor is investigating, and as of late September it had not determined whether the company broke the law. The story is now the call, not the plan.
Some layoffs require advance notice under federal or state law. Some states publish those notices online. Here is how that plays out.
In September, Virginia Business reported that a company in the surgical-kit manufacturing industry plans to close a plant and lay off 419 employees. The same month, The Philadelphia Inquirer reported that a company in the auto-service retail industry plans to eliminate about 169 head-office jobs as part of a merger with a private equity-backed chain. And ACHR News reported that a company in the HVAC contracting industry, backed by private equity since 2021, plans to close its headquarters and eliminate 96 positions.
The three reports have one thing in common: each cites a layoff notice filed with the state.
That is the risk I want every CEO to see early, if a restructuring ever reaches their desk. Once a company files a layoff notice and the state publishes it, the company no longer decides whether the change becomes public. It still decides how the people leaving are told and treated, and whether the people who stay hear it from leadership first.
The filing is a public document with a clock
In my experience, the layoff notice is easy to treat as a legal and HR step: a form, a deadline, a box to tick on the way to the plan. The deadline is real. Under the federal Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act, known as the WARN Act, an employer may not order a plant closing or mass layoff "until the end of a 60-day period after the employer serves written notice of such an order" to the affected workers or their representative, such as a union, to the state and to the chief elected official of the local government where the layoff will happen. The federal law covers employers with 100 or more employees and allows some exceptions, and some states have their own rules.
The law does not always say what happens next. It depends on what the states do with the notices. New York's Department of Labor publishes them on a public dashboard and says, "Anyone can now easily access this data at their convenience." Private trackers gather them as well. WARNTracker describes its database as "built using publicly-available information that employers are required to file with certain states when they perform large layoffs."
So here is my reading. If the state publishes a filing before leadership has said anything, the filing becomes the first public account of the change. Each of the three reports above cites a filing with the state.
A filing is not an explanation
Federal law requires a layoff notice to say what is happening, where and when. It does not require the notice to give the reason for the layoff. New York asks the employer for "the specific reason." On some of its notices, the answer is a single word: "Economic." Some notices give no reason at all. The report on the HVAC contractor put it plainly: "The notice does not state a reason for the decision."
The notices can also tell outsiders what they had not yet been told. In the surgical-kit case, the assistant county administrator told Virginia Business that the county learned the full scale of the closure through the notices, although officials had known since early in the year that consolidation or layoffs were possible. In the auto-service case, a spokesperson for the buyer had said the brand would carry on, but "declined to address the fate" of the head office.
My read is simple. Where leadership gives no reason, readers supply their own. The people at the plant, the head office and the headquarters will each fill the gap leadership leaves.
Two audiences: the people who leave and the people who stay
The instinct is to aim a layoff message at the people who are leaving. They deserve care and a clear, humane exit. The people who stay need a message too. They keep the business running after the notice is filed.
In October 2025, Careerminds, an outplacement firm, surveyed 1,000 full-time U.S. workers who had seen layoffs on their team or had been laid off in the past year. Among those who stayed, more than a third first heard about the layoffs through internal gossip. Among remaining workers who had pointed to poor communication during layoffs, 53 percent said their trust in the firm's relationship had decreased. Half of those who had seen layoffs said poor communication about them pushed them to consider leaving their role.
Two studies look at the people who stay. A laboratory experiment published in Frontiers in Psychology starts from a familiar pattern: "after layoffs, employees often report decreased commitment and performance which has been coined the survivor syndrome." The experiment found that downsizing lowered employees' performance through weaker identification with the employer. A survey of employees who stayed after downsizing at a state-owned bank in China, published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, ends with the authors' advice that it helps to maintain trust if employees "can understand the reasons" for the decisions.
A real explanation is what a filing leaves out. It is also what both groups need.
Telling them first is necessary, not sufficient
Speed alone does not solve this. On Sept. 17, tech.eu reported that a payments-technology company would cut around 200 jobs, "around a quarter of its overall headcount." Breakit, a Swedish outlet, had reported the cuts first. The CEO told staff the evening before Breakit's report. Staff heard it before the press did. That is the right order.
A week later, on Sept. 24, Fintech Garden, citing Breakit, reported the company's widening losses and a revenue shortfall after two major clients left. Both clients later returned. The reporters were doing their job. The story had moved past the announcement.
Telling them first earns a company the first word. It does not earn the last one.
If it goes wrong, the story changes subject
Back to the office-products wholesaler and its video call. A follow-up letter dated Aug. 28 set the last day of employment as Aug. 31 for those let go early, "with no severance pay or other benefits." For those employees, it meant losing their jobs and pay about a month before the date in the notice.
As of late September, the Illinois Department of Labor's inquiry had reached no finding. I draw no conclusion about the law. But the public story is now about something else. It is no longer the company's plan, or its reasons. It is how the layoff was done. Dismissing people on a video call, weeks early and with no severance, is the wrong way to treat them.
The right way: a message planned before the filing
Where the law requires a notice, leadership should plan as if the change becomes public on the filing date at the latest. A CEO doing it the right way plans the message for the people leaving and the people who stay, and asks four questions before filing. A company that files no notice can plan the same way, around the day it will tell people.
What will the filing say to anyone who reads it, whether a reporter, a county official or the company's own shift lead?
Who hears it first, and from whom? If the honest answer is a state website, the order has to change. The fix is to tell people sooner, with the notice coordinated with counsel and never delayed.
What will the people leaving be told, by whom, and what help will they get?
What will the people who stay be told? The reason, what changes for them, and whom to ask.
Then the CEO briefs the managers who need to know, close to the filing, so the people leaving and the people who stay hear it from someone they know, with the reason attached. They hear it before the filing or with it, never after it.
In the 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer, a survey across 28 countries, 78 percent of employees said they trust their own employer. Edelman calls the employer the most trusted institution. That trust is one more reason for the message to come from the employer first.
Who tells the story first?
Where a notice is required and the state publishes it, a CEO cannot control whether the change becomes public. The filing settles that. What a CEO can do is plan for affected people to hear it from leadership first, including the reason and what comes next. Layoffs will never be easy news. But planning that message before the filing is the right way to deliver difficult news.
Updated October 2026: This post now describes a survey figure more precisely, names the news sources, describes the law more fully and changes some wording.
