In an display of excellent (read: unconscionable) communication skills, RadioShack recently followed through with its plans to dismiss 400 people at their Fort Worth headquarters WITH AN EMAIL.
ABC News (link) writes “Employees at the Fort Worth headquarters received an e-mail Tuesday morning telling them they were being dismissed immediately.”
No doubt internal communicator pundits (Shel, Ron, others) are having a stroke about this, and well they should be. HR people, PR people, and any other people with souls should be shaking their heads at this. I’m not sure what to say about this, but…wow.
There must be a logical reason why calling those employees (albeit, not a fun job) into a meeting (one-on-one, 100 at a time, all at once) and have the decency to tell them to their faces that they were being let go was considered an unreasonable concept.
Maybe the company, feeling the rocky road of low margins, decided it was too time consuming and would have adversely affected the bottom line. Sadly, it must have worked, ABC reports “Shares of RadioShack rose 29 cents, or 1.6 percent, to close at $18.21 Wednesday on the New York Stock Exchange.”
I knew there was a reason besides crappy products, deplorable service, and hapless employees that I didn’t like RadioShack.
Filed under: One to watch, Public Relations | Tagged: RadioShack |
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Luke Armour - Digital Marketing and Public Relations Observations, Commentary, Frivolity 
How could a communications department ever think that this was an acceptable move?
No matter what the pressure from above to get rid off them as quickly and easily as possible (while salivating over share price increases on the horizon) – this action should never have been taken.
[…] Case in point, my last post demonstrates a horrible management decision that will ultimately look like a bad PR move. But was it a PR decision? No. Who takes the hit? The company, sure, but the PR department specifically, no doubt. In fact, here’s a blog post that actually refers to it as a PR fiasco. This will result in bad publicity, yes, it will result in bad press, yes, it will look like a foolish maneuver, yes, but it is not PR’s fault. […]
If I was ever canned via email, I’d say I never got it and keep showing up to work. I’m stubborn.