The company I work for recently experienced a sudden and drastic decline in revenue and as a result, had to lay off about 10% of our workforce.
In order to save as many people as possible, several higher ups took a pay cut. After that, we ended up still needing to let go of a few people to stay afloat.
Each of those impacted individuals received a 6 week notice of their termination and on top of that, were given a very reasonable severance package. All of them were asked to stay on and help with the transition of their workload to remaining staff. Most of them were happy to do it with this much notice.
The CEO also did an AMA and fielded some pretty tough questions from the employees. He was pretty open and honest about it. My position is such that I have just as much visibility as anyone in the company, without having to make the decisions. I saw no secrets or sweeping things under the rug. HR was great too with handling these difficult decisions with grace and actually treating people like humans.
One of my direct reports was one of the individuals impacted and I told him to just not come to work and we'd take care of things for him. He got a six week paid vacation and used that time to find a new job and focus on his family.
Of course there's still some uncertainty amongst the remaining employees with this reduction in force, but I thought the whole thing was handled very well and with respect for those impacted.
There are companies out there that do it right.