Want to lay off workers more smoothly? There's a startup for that

You might have heard about the fintech company Klarna, whose CEO recently played a prerecorded video at an all-staff meeting to tell his employees that many of them were about to be laid off. The company then made them wait for up to two days, in agonizing suspense, to find out whether they were the ones getting axed. Delivering the bad news with a boilerplate script as if they were robots, Klarna's HR execs ended up sacking about 700 workers — ten percent of its workforce — via video calls. The calls lasted 2-3 minutes, and no questions were allowed. Ouch.

Or, how about Better.com, a tech mortgage company whose CEO — and then decided to kick them when they were down, of "stealing" from the company by not being productive enough. A few months later, in a second round of layoffs, the company sent soon-to-be-terminated workers severance checks. The problem: they hadn't yet been told they were laid off.