In November of last year, a WARN letter announcing upcoming layoffs was sent to the Texas Workforce Commission. A previous round of layoffs had occurred only two months earlier, in September 2016. Reporters from KVUE and Austin Business Journal caught wind of the letter and reported the story, including updates, on November 22 and 23.
The leak must have caught Seton leadership by surprise, as it created internal turmoil for several reasons:
1. Because the sender did not specify how many employees would be laid off at each site, an independent party estimated those numbers as indicated by the handwritten tallies.
2. That person probably did not realize that Seton's Smithville hospital had few more than a total of 31 employees at the time, leading some to believe that the news story was also a surprise announcement that their hospital would actually be closing its doors in the next few months!
3. Other employees (Seton has approx 12,000 of them) were unpleasantly surprised to read about another round of layoffs - coming so soon after those a few months earlier.
So how did leadership handle the crisis? Not very well. They were quick to provide the correct number of planned layoffs for each site, which prompted the new item updates, but the dates for the layoff period remained the same. Then, they simply told employees that local media was mistakenly re-reporting on the layoffs that had already occurred in September. And for those who are wondering why the number of total layoffs varied from one month to the other - don't ask any questions.
After personally seeing a copy of the WARN letter (the information it contains is public, so all I had to do was call the Workforce and request a copy of it), I provided the following feedback in a subsequent "anonymous" MyVoice survey question.
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