Companies whose HR department workers send dismissals by e-mail should be very cautious. Apart from the ethical side of the issue, there is the purely practical side - human errors occuring when sending messages. You may experience the same situation as the insurance company Aviva experienced in the UK last week. Due to an e-mail, the company accidentaly dismissed all employees of the Aviva Investors division.
On Friday, 20 April 2012 the headquarters of Aviva Investors in London went quiet. All 1,300 employees received an e-mail from the HR department announcing that they were dismissed. The e-mail asked them to leave the company, submit corporate assets and maintain confidentiality. In the last sentence, HR thanked them and wished success in their future workplace.
The e-mail was intended only for one employee. However, it was a blanket dismissing e-mail without a personal address or other personal information. Recipients could, therefore, not tell from the content that is not addressed to them. The HR department apologized for is sending a wrong message, but why should such situations happen at all?
-kk-