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You will be creating 2 HR topic presentation about 2 different articles and both will be provided. Along with one of the PowerPoints a summary answering each question in a paragraph, an example will be provided. This presentation will also need a script for what the presenter would say for each slide. For the other PowerPoint, an article will be provided as well as questions answered throughout the slides; please make more engaging. For both there will be a rubric as guidance.
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Watch Me Lose My Job on TikTok
Lu, Yiwen
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SAN FRANCISCO —“I am about to get laid off,” Folashade Ade-Banjo spoke to the camera while positioning her
phone, “and you are about to see it.”
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In a five-minute TikTok video this month, Ade-Banjo, 30, a Los Angeles marketing professional, was shown sitting
quietly at her desk and staring at her computer, a pained look on her face as she nodded that she was ready to start.
She was being laid off by a tech giant. The video racked up a half million views and thousands of comments within
hours.
“One of my resolutions for this year was to be a lot more open and honest with things I struggle with in my own life,
so part of that is really showing parts of my life that may not be as glamorous,” Ade-Banjo said in an interview.
As companies from startup Discord to Google have shed hundreds of jobs in recent weeks, some tech workers are
taking to social media to share their layoff experiences, and many of these videos have gone viral. They show
people crying as they talk with human resources or going through their daily routine knowing a mysterious
appointment on their calendar is likely to result in their termination.
The trend is part of a movement driven by Generation Z and millennials to share every aspect of their lives on social
media, from stories about a bad date to deeply personal revelations during “get ready with me” videos of daily
routines like applying makeup, according to career experts. The layoff videos and accompanying job-hunting posts
on sites like LinkedIn and X, formerly Twitter, are shedding new light on a private moment many people try to hide.
“The boundary between the personal and professional has been broken,” said Sandra Sucher, a Harvard economist
who studies layoffs.
Some workers say they are using the videos to process the emotions of losing their job. Joni Bonnemort, 38, of Salt
Lake City, filmed herself crying as a credit repair company laid her off from her marketing job in April. She planned to
share the video only with her family but posted it to TikTok after finding out that the company had paid out bonuses
to the remaining staff a week after conducting layoffs. The video racked up more than 1.4 million views and
supportive comments.
“I wasn’t going to come off bitter like an exposé, but at the same time, it’s my experience,” Bonnemort said. “This
happened to so many people.”
Vanessa Burbano, a professor at Columbia Business School who studies how company practices influence
employee behavior, said remote work had emboldened people to speak out online.
“The interaction between individuals and their company has just fundamentally shifted with the increase of remote
work,” she said.
After receiving a 30-minute “catch-up” meeting invitation from a new manager this month, Mickella Simone Miller,
who worked remotely as a project manager based in Salt Lake City, filmed a video about her day working from
home, including choosing a coffee mug that said, “The world is falling apart around us, and I’m dying inside.” The
video eventually showed her listening to her company announce it was eliminating her role.
Beyond being therapeutic, Miller said, the video led recruiters to reach out with potential opportunities —and roughly
30 invitations to apply to new roles, although she hadn’t found a new job yet.
Companies need to realize that anything can be recorded and shared, in an age when people are increasingly
comfortable posting things online, said Lindsey Pollack, an author of career books on multigenerational workplaces.
She sees it as a positive that people are sharing layoff experiences and doesn’t think it will hurt their future chances
of employment.
In one case, Matthew Prince, the CEO of cybersecurity company Cloudflare, responded on X this month to a nineminute TikTok video of a firing at his firm. He defended the decision to fire the worker but said the company should
have been “more kind and humane.”
Brittany Pietsch, the former Cloudflare employee who posted the video, said she was going through over 10,000
LinkedIn messages, including many from recruiters.
“I don’t have any regrets,” she said. “All I did was just be candid and show a conversation that wasn’t scripted.”
While experts said the posts were unlikely to harm people’s future career prospects, they cautioned that those who
posted layoff videos needed to be OK with potential notoriety.
Ade-Banjo made her video private shortly after posting it, to protect the identities of the managers who laid her off.
She said her goal was simply to shed light on and destigmatize the process.
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“If someone else is going through this situation, they at least know that they are not alone,” she said.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
DETAILS
Subject:
Careers; Video recordings; Layoffs; Social networks
Business indexing term:
Subject: Careers Layoffs Social networks
Location:
Los Angeles California; New York; United States–US
Company / organization:
Name: New York Times Co; NAICS: 513110, 516110, 516120; Name: TikTok Inc;
NAICS: 518210; Name: LinkedIn Corp; NAICS: 518210
Identifier / keyword:
Video Recordings, Downloads And Streaming; Linkedin Corporation; Layoffs And Job
Reductions; Executives And Management (Theory); Tiktok (Bytedance); Generation Z;
Salt Lake City (Utah); Start Ups; Prince, Matthew; Bonuses; Millennial Generation;
Smartphones; Careers And Professions; Unemployment; Telecommuting; Hiring And
Promotion; Google Inc; Social Media; Advertising And Marketing; Computers And The
Internet; Los Angeles (Calif); Twitter; Workplace Environment; Workplace Hazards
And Violations; Labor And Jobs; Business
Publication title:
New York Times, Late Edition (East Coast); New York, N.Y.
Publication year:
2024
Publication date:
Jan 31, 2024
Dateline:
2024-01-31T22:24:20Z
Publisher:
New York Times Company
Place of publication:
New York, N.Y.
Country of publication:
United States, New York, N.Y.
Publication subject:
General Interest Periodicals–United States
ISSN:
03624331
Source type:
Newspaper
Language of publication:
English
Document type:
News
ProQuest document ID:
2920292487
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Document URL:
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Copyright:
Copyright New York Times Company Jan 31, 2024
Last updated:
2024-02-04
Database:
New York Times
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Grading Rubrics for the Current Event Discussion paper –
Criterion
Summary of the
article content
3 grammatical errors
in the paper
Total
32 possible points
1-3 grammatical errors
in the paper (3 points)
6-7
Average summary of
the article, leaving out
3-4 important pieces
of information
Correctly identifying 2
concepts from the
chapter text and
providing textual
evidence from the
article to support
those concepts.
Providing 2 insights
from the article in
addition to the
discussion of course
concepts and
rationale as to why
the article is relevant
to classmates (6
points)
Excellent writing with
no awkward phrasing
and/or grammatical
errors (6 points)
8-9
Good summary of
the article, leaving
out 1 -2 important
piece of information
Correctly identifying
3 concepts from the
chapter text and
providing textual
evidence from the
article to support
those concepts.
10
Excellent summary of the
article, including all
important content from
the article
Correctly identifying 4 or
more concepts from the
chapter text and
providing textual
evidence from the article
to support those
concepts.
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Example:
Sample current event in Human Resource Management summary and discussion
1. What is the current event and how is it relevant to the material in the course?
Answer: The current event that I discussed in this paper comes from the Wall Street Journal,
dated January 12, 2024. In the article titled “Why Big Tech is still minding its bills, layoffs at
Google, Amazon kick off year that will see higher AI spending but likely limited revenue
impact” written by correspondent Dan Gallagher, it was reported that despite these firms’
revenue growth over the past year of 2023, Google and Amazon still began to lay off hundreds of
employees at the start of the year in 2024. We might wonder why they had to resort to laying off
employees. Several reasons were given in the article. First, despite their increasing revenue
growth, their free cash flow is limited, which is just under $95 billion combined for Google and
Amazon in annual free cash flow (Gallagher, 2024). Second, cost cutting was evidently needed
to compete with other technology firms, notably Microsoft, which had a good head start with
their acquisition of Open AI and its ChatGPT, in their race to invest in generative AI service.
Third and last, the return on investment (ROI) in AI takes time, which necessitated the cost
cutting measure of laying off employees as reported in the article (Gallagher, 2024).
In addition to the above three reasons explaining the layoff, according to the article, Google and
Amazon will be judged in terms of their profit margins relative to Microsoft, in their race to
catch up with Microsoft in building and implementing generative AI services. Specifically,
whereas Microsoft revenue is expected to increase by 14% in 2024, the same for Google and
Amazon will be 11% and 12% respectively (Gallagher, 2024). Additionally, Microsoft’s early
and heavy investment in generative AI has made its stock increase in value so much that it
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overtook Apple as the most valuable U.S. company in terms of market capitalization, valued at
more than a trillion dollars higher than its two AI rivals (Gallagher, 2024).
Many concepts discussed in this article are related to Strategic Human Resource
Management, but I summarized the three most relevant to our course in this paper from Chapter
2 – Human Resource Management through a strategic perspective written by Alison Rieple,
Marco Pironti, Paola Pisano, and Valentina Cilo, edited by Paul Smith and Gary Rees (2021).
The first concept is the corporate strategy concept presented and discussed on page 37.
Specifically, both Google and Amazon follow a prescriptive approach to corporate strategy as
described on page 37 (Rieple et al., 2021). The first piece of supporting evidence of this concept
is that the objective of the corporate strategy has been defined in advance, i.e., revenue growth
for Google or its parent company, Alphabet is expected to rise 11% in 2024 while Amazon’s
revenue growth is expected to rise 12% in 2024 (Gallagher, 2024). The second piece of
supporting evidence concerns the main elements of corporate strategy being developed before
the implementation of such a strategy. For example, Google began laying off hundreds of
employees during the second week of January 2024 across several divisions including Google
Voice assistant and device businesses including Nest and Fitbit.
In addition, as shown in Figure 2.1, an organization’s strategy is also influenced by its
external environment (i.e., the industry environment including customers, suppliers, and
competitors). Tesla’s strategy of producing more car parts in-house, rather than outsourcing their
production, made it more in control of its own supply chain and less dependent of outside
suppliers. This illustrates the linkage between strategy and suppliers as shown in Figure 2.1 to be
weaker when the company retains its production in-house. Amazon also began laying off
hundreds of employees in its Prime Video, MGM studios and Twitch divisions. No specific
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numbers were disclosed of the layoffs, but it was reported in the article that the numbers were
expected to be lower than 12,000 and 18,000 for both firms respectively as they were the
numbers of employees being laid off in 2023.
The second concept is the linkages between the firm, its organizational and business
strategy, and the industry environment as depicted in Figure 2.1 on page 38. According to the
Figure, an organization’s strategy is reciprocally influenced by both its own internal environment
(i.e., the firm) and external environment (i.e., the industry rivals). It can be said that Google and
Amazon were both influenced by the industry environment in terms of their corporate strategy.
Specifically, their decision to lay off employees as a cost-cutting measure was influenced by
what their competitors (i.e., Microsoft) were doing. Their decision to lay off employees followed
the same move by Microsoft, which laid off 10,000 employees last year in 2023 and just started
to see their investment in AI pay off this year. Internally, both firms’ decision to cut hundreds of
employees is a continuation of their corporate strategy of retrenchment (i.e., downsizing) that
began last year in 2023, dubbed as “the year of efficiency”.
The third concept illustrated in the article is the strategy based on competitors –
specifically the red ocean strategy, discussed on pages 64 and 65 in the textbook. As reported in
the article, both Google and Amazon tried to catch up with Microsoft, which has a head start in
their race to build up AI-based services. Both companies try to outperform Microsoft in 2024 to
increase their revenue growth and market share, evidenced by taking on the risky investment in
generative AI. Supporting evidence from the article includes: “Will big corporate customers and
consumers pay up for ChatGPT-like capabilities to enhance applications such as web search,
writing documents, creating images, and running spreadsheets?” and Google unveiled their
Gemini model, while Amazon is developing Olympus to compete with ChatGPT version 4
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owned by Microsoft (Gallagher, 2024). Google and Amazon’s decision to continue laying off
employees in 2024 was based on the value/cost trade-off, a typical feature of the red ocean
strategy (see Figure 2.9, p. 65, Rieple et al., 2021). Both companies decided to allocate more
resources and prioritize hiring in areas of growth (i.e., generative AI) while divests in areas of no
growth (i.e., Google voice assistant, Fitbit, Amazon Prime video, Twitch, MGM studios) – this is
consistent with the red ocean strategy in practice (e.g., escalating R&D expenditure to scare off
new entrants to reshape the forces in the industry in their favor (p. 67).
2. How has it helped you understand the course material in a better or deeper manner? (i.e.,
article takeaways)
Answer: This article has helped me better understand the three concepts identified in the
previous paragraphs and other concepts not mentioned due to space constraint. First, the article
illustrates to me how leading an organization through the period of a post pandemic slump can be
challenging with its own risks as well as requiring good strategic planning. Even though both
Google and Amazon saw improvements in their online advertising and e-commerce respectively
in 2023, their limited free cash flow relative to their cash and short-term investments, i.e., assets,
require them to invest wisely in generative AI. As reported in the article, Google and Amazon
did not have the license to spend freely, which explains why they had to lay off employees as a
cost-cutting measure. Second, the article portrayed the challenges faced by CEOs in leading an
organization such as Google and Amazon to sustain its growth and profitability during times of
uncertainty caused by the economic slowdown post pandemic. One challenge is how to balance
profit maximization with being a responsible or ethical employer. For example, the stock value
went up immediately after the layoff announcement. However, the pandemic accelerated the
adoption of technology (e.g., machine learning, artificial intelligence) by large corporations that
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replace jobs traditionally done by workers. This poses another challenge of how to be a
responsible and ethical employer in conducting layoffs or delaying layoffs to keep jobs or
generating jobs that augment automation for employees. How do we make sure that those CEOs
manage their companies responsibly is a lingering question that I have after reading this article?
With so many uncertainties surrounding if and when the pandemic is over, it makes planning for
continuing operation with safety of the workers as number one priority almost impossible
without being flexible.
3. How could this current event be relevant to you and your classmates when you graduate
and enter the working world? Why?
Answer: As a human resource management student who will soon enter the working world upon
graduation, this article provokes me to think about what I will do to balance my dual roles of
being an advocate for employees and an HR business partner to my employer. For example,
should I advocate for more health benefits (i.e., quality enhancement strategy) to help reduce
burnout among employees or should I try to cut costs (i.e., cost leadership strategy) to benefit my
employer by steering employees to lower benefit options such as telehealth as a result of the
automation and AI-based health care service delivery? In addition, how do we as future HR
managers build trust with our employees and customers now that our jobs are shifted to
teleworking with less or no face time with our employees compared to before the pandemic? In
addition, how do we advocate for employees whose jobs and skills are rendered obsolete by new
technologies such as generative AI?
Reading this article made me realize that the challenge for HR managers in this case becomes
more acute because we have dual conflicting roles, one is to advocate for the employees and the
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other is to be loyal and advocate for the employer. As a future HR manager myself, I need to
align my interest with the employees first because I am first and foremost an employee.
References
Gallagher, D. (2024). Why Big Tech is still minding its bills; Layoffs at Google, Amazon kick
off year that will see higher AI spending but likely limited revenue impact. Retrieved
from https://www.wsj.com/tech/why-big-tech-is-still-minding-its-bills-f098bcad
Rieple, A., Pironti, M., Pisano, P., & Cillo, V. (2021). Human Resource Management through a
strategic perspective. In G. Rees & P.E. Smith (Eds). Strategic Human Resource
management: An international perspective (3rd edition). Sage Publications, Inc. London:
UK.
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