Nobody gets laid off anymore. Companies stopped doing that sometime around 2019, right as the euphemism supply chain scaled up to meet demand. What they do now is a rich and expanding vocabulary of alternatives, each one engineered to describe the exact same Tuesday-morning Slack message without ever using a verb that sounds like what happened. We've compiled the current field guide, for reference.
"Right-sizing"
Implies the company was previously the wrong size, in the specific direction of too large, and is now being corrected toward some Platonic ideal headcount that, coincidentally, was always going to be reached in a quarter with disappointing revenue. Nobody has ever been "right-sized" upward. The size only ever corrects one way, which tells you the sizing was never really the variable in question.
"Restructuring"
The organizational chart equivalent of "we're renovating," except nothing is being renovated — several rooms are simply being removed from the building, and the remaining rooms are being told this is now more efficient. A restructuring always produces an org chart with fewer boxes and the same number of dotted lines, because dotted lines, like hope, are free.
"Actioning a reduction in force"
Turns a layoff into a bureaucratic process with a name — RIF — and turns the verb "fire" into "action," a word doing its best impression of a neutral administrative task, like actioning an expense report. The passive construction is the whole game: nobody is firing anyone. A reduction is simply being actioned, by no one in particular, the way weather happens.
"Streamlining the organization"
Implies the org chart had excess drag, like a car losing fuel efficiency to a poorly shaped side mirror. The side mirror, in this metaphor, was a team of people with health insurance. Streamlining always sounds aerodynamic and never sounds like what it is, which is the only reason anyone uses it.
"Aligning the team with our strategic priorities"
The subtext here is that the departing employees were misaligned, a word that manages to make the layoff sound like it was the employee's positioning problem rather than a line item. Nobody has ever been told, in the moment, which specific priority they failed to align with. The alignment is retroactive, applied to the org chart after the fact, the way you'd explain a shape by describing the hole it left.
"Transitioning into our alumni network"
The single most audacious entry on this list. You have not joined a network. You have been removed from a Slack workspace and added, without being consulted, to a LinkedIn group that will email you once a year about a reunion nobody organizes. "Alumni" implies you graduated. What actually happened is closer to being un-enrolled, but "un-enrollment network" tested poorly, presumably with actual humans.
"Difficult but necessary decisions"
This phrase appears in literally every layoff announcement, always in the first paragraph, always unattached to any specifics about what made the decision difficult, for whom, or necessary in what sense. It functions as a kind of thoughts-and-prayers for capital allocation: a sentence shaped like empathy, containing none, that nonetheless satisfies the internal requirement that empathy be gestured at before the numbers arrive.
"We're saying goodbye to some incredible people"
Note the tense. Not "we laid off," but "we're saying goodbye," as if this were a going-away party the company is hosting for itself, generously, on your behalf, using your departure as the occasion. The word "incredible" is doing overtime here too — it is easier to call someone incredible in a public post than to explain, to their face, why incredible wasn't sufficient to keep the role.
Our recommendation
If you must do the thing this glossary describes, at minimum use a verb. "We laid off 200 people" is a sentence that respects the reader enough to tell them what occurred. It will read as harsher than "actioning a reduction in force," because it is — that's the part everyone's been trying to engineer around for six years, and it's also the only part that was ever true.
If your next all-hands deck currently says "streamlining" and you'd like help finding the actual verb, email us at contact@b2bsaas.guru. We can't undo the decision. We can at least stop you from calling it a network.