Every single person I know that’s been laid off is 50 years or older, or very close. All of them are tenured, high-performing people. Is there something here? Also, I cannot understand for the life of me why they didn’t attempt to get rid of low performers as a first pass at reducing headcount. I was laid off as a director and I have 2 people who are a “needs improvement” and one other less than stellar person who easily could have been let go. My colleague was 1 of a handful of directors in her department , some of whom are younger and only here 1-2 years, and yet she was let go as the elder, tenured person. It doesn’t feel right and maybe could be ageism?
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Ageism and Tenured employees are first to go when a company is failing.
I was also not invited to important meetings and events I would normally attend. Found out about some of them by others who assumed I would there or on LinkedIn. When asked about it, all I got was “oops” or no response at all. A lot of this work started in 2021 and especially 2022 and I’m sure age, salary, politics, demographic mix, tenure, etc. played into decisions. If you checked the right layoff boxes, you were added to the list so the end result list “looked right.” They mixed a few under 40 in there just to make it seem like age wasn’t a factor when it was. Many assumptions about age and other demographic stereotypes are usually wrong. I guess they want to hire only under those in their 20s and 30s to create products and services for those customers in their 40s, 50s and 60s+ because they have so much empathy, life experience and colleague education that colleagues 40+ do not have?!
2 people were cut on my team--2 women over 60. My manager knew I would be cut bc she "forgot" to invite me to team meetings. She kept everyone under 40.
As managers we reviewed and ranked performance of our group overall but we did not know who was going to be impacted at all and the list and the message was delivered from the director level. I’m not sure how other departments handled it.
Of course, it was ageism. Not only do they get to cut higher salaries, but they also get rid of higher health care costs.
Do you really believe they are "leading with heart?"
There is ageism, big time. God forbid you have experience. It is something that the over 50 crowd knows, but can't prove. Perhaps they should become really woke and add ageism to all of the other isms that "claim" to distain.
My manager gave me almost no work for the last sprint. I am absolutely positive she knew and probably nominated me to be cut. I questioned it and didn't really get an answer.
Not necessarily ageism, but more likely those tenured people have high salaries. So the criteria for targeting was not only performance, but also high salary, maybe also span of control for managers. A Director making $100k a year can be let go and their team combined under a lower salary Director and BAM, they save $100K without impacting production.
Women hit hard would make sense because the Enterprise is 80% female
HR absolutely has a listing that was vetted by consultants to make sure they weren’t vulnerable. Also, just fyi, the reason they’re making it so you can add pronouns/identify as lgbt/etc. is because they want to make sure they’re covered on that end too, they don’t actually give a rats a-s otherwise.
Women were hot hard. Let's look at those numbers. How many females were let go.
who wrote the performance reviews. and if they have been poor performers for sometime without improvement one must look to their leadership. also, were they on a Performance Improvement Plan or did leadership just keep kicking that can down the road...
There’s a lot of AMs who can lead people far better than managers. Associate Managers do most of the managers job anyways .
Our team the lowest performers were let go . Fixing to clean house on the associate managers before the end of the year
If you’re all so concerned then talk to a lawyer. But the data better backup the accusations. I’m guessing that the lists were vetted by HR and Legal and probably outside counsel to ensure there wasn’t any specific skewing toward any particular protected class.
Colleagues of color took a big hit in the all the 2023 layoffs-people forget there were 1k colleagues eliminated in Q1 & Q2.
I agree with one of the posters, VPs-selected colleagues, often those that were more vocal, to eliminate. High performing teams left with inexperienced, less than a year(some less than 6 months) kept
Original poster - I have been thinking the same thing. None of it makes sense. I could name 4 people on my team that could’ve been let go. But nope it was me! High performing, mentor, trainer, and impeccable attendance.
My son is 26, whole team was removed.
My department cut middle aged employees and kept older employees. That's ridiculous because those employees will be retiring.
Managers say they weren't involved with layoffs but they were. If you were laid off your manager knew it and put you on the chopping block
I know who was cut on 5 teams and it didn't look like ageism. On one team it was the newest people, which made sense because institutional knowledge is important due to the platform they use. Two were individual contributor managers. On another it was low performers across a range of ages. On three other teams, it was senior managers with few reports, two in their 30s and the other 50s, at least two high performers. I heard it was a general trend that managers and senior managers with significant individual contributor responsibilities were targeted because the goal was to have analysts handle that work and report to managers whose job was almost exclusively people-managing- basically collapsing layers of management into fewer levels. Cheaper to get the work done that way.
It was handled by the VPs to decide who was cut. This is first hand knowledge told to me by a VP.
The VP that spoke with us said he was given a number of heads to reduce that we're under him as directed by their EVP.
They in turn cut 1 director and then relayed to the directors a number they had to cut.
There was no universal decision such as "cut anyone over 40" by cvs but some directors then took ot further to put in budget controls for the teams under them.
It's entirely possible some VPs/directors/etc made a decision on who based solely on payroll amounts. Older employees don't always equal higher paid, but many corporate employees are looooong term employee aka much more expensive to keep vs a newer employee.
Some sh---y bosses absolutely could be doing it based on age but I wouldn't say it's universal. We have a friend who was cut and she is in her mid 30s....but has been with CVS since she was in college.