Why companies like Kyte Baby keep screwing up, virally

Analysis by Allison Morrow, CNN

New York (CNN) — Editor’s Note: A version of this story appeared in CNN Business’ Nightcap newsletter. To get it in your inbox, sign up for free, here.

Office work has become a far less rigid affair in the era of remote collaboration and hybrid schedules. (Just ask me, I’m writing this in bed while wearing a hoodie and yoga pants on a Monday afternoon.)

But a lot of companies haven’t updated their scripts when it comes to delivering hard news to their employees.

Corporate-speak — that banal, jargon-heavy workplace lingo — is one of those dehumanizing habits from the Before Times that has proven hard to break.

And in the era of TikTok (and shameless oversharing online generally), that’s increasingly proving to be a liability.

ICYMI: Two weeks ago, a Cloudflare employee filmed herself getting fired over a web meeting in an interaction that company’s CEO later called “painful” to watch, partly because of the lack of humanity in the way HR reps delivered the news

And this week, the CEO of clothing company Kyte Baby offered up two public apologies — the first for denying an employee’s request to work remotely while that employee’s newborn was in intensive care, and a second for how detached and scripted the first apology sounded.

In both situations, the corporate comms strategy, or lack thereof, made an already difficult, emotional situation even worse. The companies stuck to their rigid rules about remote work and performance metrics. And in both cases, the fired employees funneled their anger toward a social media audience that would have their backs.

“I am forever amazed at the tendency of corporate America to want to strip the humanity out of their communications, whether it be an apology or any other public statement,” crisis PR expert James Haggerty told my colleague Eva Rothenberg.

“It could be that the lawyers get too involved, and have final say too often. More likely, though, it’s that everyone in the corporate environment is just so used to falling back on corporate-speak, banal cliches, legalese and muddied equivocation. What works in a corporate board meeting doesn’t often fly with the public … and it sure doesn’t work on social media.”

Kyte Baby’s CEO and founder, Ying Liu, learned that the hard way this week.

In her first apology, Liu is on message — clearly reading from a prepared statement — succinct and stiff. It is the kind of button-down speech that might not have raised eyebrows if delivered in a board room.

But on TikTok, outrage over the employee’s situation was already boiling over, and Liu’s canned delivery struck the exact wrong note, as she later acknowledged.

“The comments were right — it was scripted … I just basically read it, it wasn’t sincere,” she says in her second apology video. “I’ve decided to go off script and just tell you exactly what happened.”

In the Cloudflare layoff video, viewed more than 2 million times on TikTok alone, two HR employees can be heard telling the woman that her performance didn’t meet expectations.

The problem, Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince wrote on X, was that the two HR reps had never met the woman they were letting go, and couldn’t provide any specifics when she pressed them for information. The laid-off employee noted that she had just been hired in August and had been told she was an excellent employee.

“Clearly we were far from perfect … HR should be involved, but it shouldn’t be outsourced to them,” Prince wrote. “No employee should ever actually be surprised they weren’t performing.”

Whether the Cloudflare episode is something we should model is debatable (and the people on the internet are certainly debating). But either way, the episode underscores a relatively new tool workers have to wield power and rally support when they feel mistreated.

Once upon a time, a bungled speech or messy layoff might have sparked some grumbling, but would rarely be caught on video or rabidly shared and commented upon by millions of people outside the company. But any half decent comms director in the digital age should expect that there’s a potential for anything a leader says to become a viral moment.

“There’s never been a good layoff, right?” one media comms director told me. “But speaking to your colleagues as humans is always best. And that’s in plain language, getting to the point, avoiding euphemisms and corporate-speak as much as possible.”

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