Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky has a philosophy on layoffs: ‘If you’re going to cut jobs, you better cut deep enough’

So far, this year has been a layoff bloodbath.

Some 417,500 jobs were cut in just the first three months of 2023 by U.S.-based employers alone, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

What’s more, with companies like Meta and Amazon already on their third round of layoffs of the year, the constant culling of headcount can feel relentless.

That's why Airbnb’s CEO and cofounder, Brian Chesky, says that struggling firms are better off saving the mental toll that multi-round layoffs take on the surviving employees by doing one drastic sweep.

“Multiple layoffs can be very difficult from a cultural standpoint, because if there's more than one, then people can't trust they’ll ever end—and the company is like, in a paralyzed standstill if that happens,” he said in a video interview with Bloomberg, when probed about how Meta, Amazon and others are handling layoffs.

“When you do a layoff, if you're going to cut you need to cut once, and therefore you better cut deep enough,” Chesky insisted. “Try to avoid doing multiple layoffs.”

Why are CEOs using the same layoff language?

The other layoff norm that Chesky took issue with is the robotic carbon-copy manner in which they’re all seemingly being announced.

“I always felt like when I read some of these corporate communications that...they weren't written by people,” Chesky explained while adding that the corporate jargon is probably written by "committee."

“It felt like maybe a bunch of lawyers or HR people had sanded edges off the person to the point where the person speaking wouldn't actually talk like that,” he continued.

He may have a point.

Spotify’s CEO Daniel Ek confessed “I take full accountability for the moves that got us here today” while announcing that 6% of the company was being laid off at the beginning of the year. It echoed Mark Zuckerberg's note to staff in November after announcing the first major layoff in Meta’s 18-year history, which began, “I want to take accountability for these decisions and for how we got here.”