War-game a severance communications plan before scripts, timing, and access cuts harden into what every affected person hears.
Severance communications fail when managers learn the script from a peer's private call, when IT cuts access before the conversation ends, when FAQ answers invent benefits the packet does not contain, and when "we treated people with dignity" stands in for measured support load. A polished all-hands draft is not evidence.
Freeze the package
State who is in scope, the sequence of manager conversations and broader notices, who owns benefits and outplacement answers, how access and device return work the same day, and the success metric after two weeks of support tickets. Attach legal review notes, manager talk tracks, FAQ drafts, and the kill criteria if leaks or inconsistent answers spike. If people ops, legal, and IT disagree on when access ends, reconcile before seating.
Name the decision you will make if the war game finds nothing new, and the hold criteria if any manager lacks a script or a named escalation path.
Seats
- Affected employee. What feels unfair, incomplete, or timed to silence questions.
- Manager. Load when several conversations land on the same hour.
- People ops. Benefits, outplacement, and ticket volume after the first wave.
- IT and security. Access cuts that protect systems without humiliating people mid-call.
- Skeptic. The claim that looks strongest and is least sourced.
Optional counsel seat if WARN, release language, or jurisdiction rules bind the wording. Same pack for every seat.
Run the loop
Feed Pingpong the comms memo and exhibits. First pass steelmans the sequence. Later passes attack from the seats above. Final pass turns surviving objections into clearer timing, fairer FAQ answers, or a hold. Delete invented "everyone already knows" claims and dual-counted support hours.
Force a day-after narrative: what happens if a screenshot of the FAQ lands on social media, if a manager improvises benefits language, or if access cuts hit someone still on a customer call. If those stories are stronger than your fairness and systems plan, fix the package before you send it. Separate severance communications from a broader layoff strategy deck so expectations stay predictable.
Ask every seat to mark which steps are optional in practice. Optional manager dry-runs that never happen still appear in the plan doc. If leaders skip dry-runs under calendar pressure, people ops should treat that skip as a design failure. Write the mandatory steps into the package, then attack whether capacity can actually clear them. Related: before you announce layoffs, war-game a layoff communications plan, before you let someone go, war-game an all-hands message, and the war-game decisions hub. Process: how to run a Pingpong.