For half or one percent of outliers, you could give them an earlier heads-up. But for 99+% of the people in a massive layoff, I do think you need to do it in a single day for the practical reason that you want everyone to get certainty as quickly as possible.
Can you imagine the chaos in a company if layoff certainty takes a week or two weeks to achieve? This is not a time for eventual consistency.
If the boss is inconvenienced by treating workers with respect, then so be it.
Workers' interests are often at odds with their boss's interests. If you're just figuring this out then I sympathize with you on that point, but I side with the workers here.
I believe that reducing the uncertainty window from 1-2 weeks to a single day is entirely for the purposes of treating workers with respect. I think it's fundamentally disrespectful to send people to sleep multiple nights and perhaps over a weekend while in a state of grave uncertainty for their near-term economic future. The greater respect is respecting their psychological needs rather than the performative respect of whether the notice was delivered by email or in person.
I'd much rather get fired by email [or "all clear" by email] on the first day layoffs begin than to get fired in person 10 calendar days after layoffs begin. I don't think I'm an outlier here.
The layoffs at these companies have been 12,000 people, 18,000... no, 1:1s just aren't going to happen. Massive layoffs like this require swift execution, not dragged out over the weeks or months it would take to give everyone a personalized sendoff. In fact, the basic premise of these mass layoffs is that they're not personalized. Entire departments and teams are cut, etc.
You may disagree with the very idea of laying off tens of thousands of people at once, but this is still the only reasonable way to execute them.
