Dive Brief:

• Employers looking for an example of how not to lay off workers only need check out at how things allegedly unfolded recently at IBT Media, according to media reports.
• Ex-IBT Media employees launched a hashtag, #IBTWTF, to communicate the publisher’s poor treatment of laid off workers, including partial severance (people with less than a year got none), no layoff notice and no pay for its international staff in June, Digiday reported. It even kept people's personal belongings locked up in the offices and has gone incommunicado, the tweets reported.
• The nine-year-old publisher laid off scores of people last month at its flagship International Business Times and at Newsweek, which it bought three years ago but spun off.

Dive Insight:

Few employers are immune to layoffs. But media reports of what is happening to IBT employees exemplify what can potentially go wrong when employer communication is not prioritized, especially in the age of social media.

For example, Owen Davis, an ex-reporter at IBT, said the company's decision to wait two weeks before announcing severance terms (after the initial surprise layoff announcement) forced he and others to take to Twitter to state their unhappiness. The ex-employees asked for two weeks for every year and a week for anyone with less than a year; IBT Media countered with one week’s severance per year for employees with one-plus years of experience and none for people who were there less than a year.

Neither CNN Money nor Digiday received a comment from IBT Media. While the situation is not completely over, it's shaping up as a great case study for HR leaders on how not to execute a layoff plan.