I’ve written before that layoffs are a one-on-one activity, that there’s only one right way to fire someone—in person, face to face, supervisor to worker. There’s a reason for this, and it is simple: It should be handled that way because management should be forced to personally confront the consequences of its actions.

Sometimes, however, organizations do dumb things and opt NOT to handle layoffs in a personal manner. RadioShack did this a couple of years ago when it dismissed 400 people via e-mail, to the company’s ever-lasting shame.

An e-mail firing, I said at the time, is the ultimate management cop-out because it further dehumanizes a process that is pretty inhuman to begin with.

Well, here’s another example of a company letting employees know of a layoff via e-mail, but unlike RadioShack, this instance was due to a dumb mouse-click mistake.

Advertising Age, a sister publication of Workforce Management, reports that “struggling media agency Carat is planning a major restructuring of its U.S. operations, including an undetermined number of layoffs—news it accidentally released today via a memo the agency’s top New York-based HR executive e-mailed to the entire agency that appeared to be intended only for senior managers.”

Yes, the company’s chief people officer accidentally e-mailed Microsoft PowerPoint and Word documents about how the company was planning to handle layoffs “to all staffers before the mistake was realized, and it was pulled back by the IT department.” The documents, which were sent to Advertising Age and are now posted on adage.com, “detail talking points for managers as they talk to clients, vendors, the press and employees as Carat tries to navigate the fallout from the news” of the layoffs.

If you look at the documents, you’ll quickly see that the company was trying to take great care to manage the layoffs and give managers guidance on how to talk to employees and clients and manage the situation to the best of their ability. There’s some silly politically correct language in there—they want layoffs referred to as “right-sizing”—but for the most part, Carat’s management team seems to have been trying to do the right thing.

Unfortunately, those good intentions won’t matter in the end. All the soon-to-be former employees of Carat will remember is that they were told about a mass layoff—that might include them—by e-mail. Sure, it was inadvertent, but no one is going to remember that part. What will persist is the sting of being dismissed in a very impersonal way.

Another problem for Carat will be scraping off the ceiling the people it wasn’t firing—who Carat really wants to keep, in fact—but who also got the misdirected memo. One of the talking points prepared for managers in response to any questions about further reductions noted that “although no one can ever predict what the future will bring, we do not anticipate another action of this nature in the foreseeable future.” Somehow, I don’t think the left-behind employees will buy that.
 
Advertising Age asked me to comment for its story since Workforce Management writes about these issues all the time. As someone who has occasionally sent out an embarrassing e-mail to the wrong person (which almost everyone does at least once), I feel for Rose Zory, Carat’s chief people officer, who sent out the e-mail in question. She simply made a mistake, in the heat of the moment, and probably wants to crawl into a hole right now.

But as I told Advertising Age, “You would think that the chief people officer would be more careful given their position in the company—a reasonable assumption to make—but that’s not always the case. Owning up to the problem, apologizing and emphasizing it was a terrible mistake won’t solve this or make it better, but can go a long way toward getting beyond it quickly. Still, if I were the CEO, I might want to start looking for a new chief people officer. You pay those people to step up in these situations, not make it worse.”