HR Besties: Coping With Job Loss
HR BESTIES
HR Besties LLC
4.8 • 586 Ratings
🗓️ 6 August 2025
⏱️ 40 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Today's agenda:
- HR Worsties
- Cringe corporate speak: difficult but necessary
- Hot topic: all things layoffs, job loss and coping with uncertainty and a big transition
- Taking the time to heal and reach out for support
- Not only the loss of benefits, but perhaps self worth and identity
- Letting it in and letting it out - taking the time to process or be upset is more than okay
- Letting go of the control over the situation
- Honesty = respect. Leaders should approach tough conversations with empathy and respect for team members
- Questions/Comments
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Tune in to "HR Besties," a business, work and management podcast hosted by Leigh Elena Henderson (HRManifesto), Ashley Herd (ManagerMethod) and Jamie Jackson (Humorous_Resources), where we navigate the labyrinth of corporate culture, from cringe corporate speak to toxic leadership. Whether you're in Human Resources or not, corporate or small business, we offer sneak peeks into surviving work, hiring strategies, and making the employee experience better for all. Tune in for real talk on employee engagement, green flags in the workplace, and how to turn red flags into real change. Don't miss our chats about leadership, career coaching, and takes from work travel and watercooler gossip. Get new episodes every Wednesday, follow us on socials for the latest updates, and join us at our virtual happy hours to share your HR stories.
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Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Ooh, do I have a story for y'all? |
| 0:08.6 | We're going to start off season six with a bang, y'all. |
| 0:11.9 | Well, that could mean a lot of things. |
| 0:15.3 | As we know, continue, please. |
| 0:17.5 | I'm going to share my layoff story from my most recent letting go, I guess, |
| 0:24.2 | which I know you ladies have heard this, so bear with me, but I need to share because it is |
| 0:29.4 | fucking wild. So a little backstory is I was with this company for three years. It was a startup. |
| 0:36.3 | I was one of the first 50, so I helped build specifically the HR department from the ground up. In January this year, I got a new leader. Unfortunately, my leader left, loved her. I would have followed her anywhere. Unfortunately, I couldn't at this particular time because she went to another startup and she didn't have positions open yet. But we got a new leader. |
| 0:54.9 | And I could tell early on that she was going to make changes in our department. And I felt it. |
| 1:03.4 | And she was not very necessarily open, but the question she was asking me, for instance, can I have a copy of your job description? |
| 1:11.8 | Can you, in an email, tell me exactly what you do, how you do it? |
| 1:16.4 | Can you invite me to meetings that, you are a part of? |
| 1:20.4 | Because I just want to learn. |
| 1:21.5 | But to me, that wasn't learning. |
| 1:23.9 | And it would be, in theory, micromanaging, right? Like, I get she's new. She wants to |
| 1:29.5 | understand each of the people in their roles in her department. Now, you know, the people |
| 1:34.8 | department is now her. She wants to understand it. Probably about three months in to her taking |
| 1:40.5 | this position, she had to let me know that my position was being eliminated. Okay, it sucks. |
| 1:46.9 | I didn't necessarily not expect it, but she asked me to go ahead and figure out a date that worked for me |
| 1:54.1 | to be my last day. So I went ahead. I wrote her an email and I was very careful with my choice |
| 1:59.7 | of words because I was not resigning. I was being let go. So in my email, I even titled it at the top, my last day. And I picked a date. It was about a month out. So I was giving them a month worth of work where I was trying to tie up my loose ends, pass on work that needed to be pass on, et cetera, et cetera, because I have |
| 2:18.4 | three years worth of stuff I built from the ground up, right? So about a week before my final day, |
... |
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