For all its success in the business world, Microsoft sometimes does some pretty dumb things when it comes to managing and dealing with its people.

Earlier this year, for example, the company made a mistake in a mass layoff by overpaying the amount of severance it gave to a few of the departing workers. “The company received heavy criticism,” according to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, “after it wrote to some of the 1,400 employees it laid off … stating that because of an administrative error it had paid them too much severance and now wanted the money returned.”

The overpayments weren’t that big—they ranged from hundreds of dollars up to $5,000 per employee—but the notion of requiring laid-off workers to pay back a relatively small amount of money due to a company foul-up seemed pretty callous. Microsoft senior vice president of human resources Lisa Brummel ended up having to do damage control on this one and eventually fell on her sword and said the company erred in asking for the money back.

This week, the company is again laying off some workers, but the twist this time is that Microsoft doesn’t want a lot of internal e-mails discussing the layoff. So, Microsoft HR chief Brummel sent out a memo asking employees, as The Wall Street Journal’s Digits blog put it, “to lay off the layoff e-mails.”

She said that senior management has “asked leaders across the company to minimize the amount of e-mail sent today, as employees told us the e-mail volume in January was distracting.” For the latest round of layoffs, Brummel wrote that Microsoft “leaders have agreed to streamline their e-mail communications.”

Of course, The Wall Street Journal found out about the don’t-talk-about-the-layoffs e-mail when a copy of Brummel’s memo “was posted in the comments section of Mini-Microsoft, a blog run by an anonymous Microsoft employee that’s popular with company staffers.”

This just proves one of the basic rules that every smart, thinking manager should inherently understand: Trying to muzzle or otherwise pressure employees to limit communications about something as serious as a mass layoff is both futile and shortsighted.

Microsoft management will undoubtedly claim that limiting e-mail communications in this instance is a good thing. In fact, Brummel’s admonition is that “rather than sending e-mail, we encourage you to meet with your employees face-to-face or via Live Meeting, where possible, to address their questions.”

Face-to-face communication, especially about something as critical as a mass layoff, is always the best way to go. But, most anyone who has handled layoffs will tell you that over-communication is always preferable to under-communication, so why would Microsoft want to limit in any way a critical tool they have to help communicate with both the departing and surviving employees?

Never mind the odd notion of a high-tech company wanting to stifle high-tech communications; trying to tell employees NOT to discuss something as serious as a mass layoff, in any way, shape, or form only invites more rumors and discussion of the very thing that management is trying to curtail.

And, it fails to understand the psychology of layoffs. This will be the ONLY real topic that Microsoft people will be talking about right now, and a management admonition to limit discussion about the situation in any way is simply futile and counterproductive, because workers will be chattering about the layoffs ad infinitum, no matter what management says.

This just proves another management truism: Don’t ever underestimate the ability of smart companies to do dumb things. You’d think Microsoft would have learned this lesson from the overpaid-severance fiasco, but clearly, handling layoffs the right way is something that even highly successful companies like Microsoft have a hard time getting straight.

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