[_b]

Companies do layoffs in a dehumanizing way largely to avoid lawsuits. If individual managers communicate it, some might say something wrong and invite a lawsuit. Even if they don't say anything wrong, some of the people being laid-off may misremember what they were told, and without a clear record of what they were told, they might win a lawsuit. In contrast, a mass email laying people off has the advantages that lawyers can review it beforehand, and it is clearly document exactly what was told to the employee in the course of laying them off.

The other part is they want to lay everyone off at the same time, so people aren't finding out at different times and wondering if they are safe or not. An email, sent to everyone at the same time, achieves that much better than trying to rapidly schedule a lot of simultaneous meetings.

Perhaps there is a better way, but that is the conventional wisdom that I've heard from folks planning layoffs.

[pas]

Why doesn't the company announce that they are going to cut about so and so many people in the next this and that timeframe? A lot of folks would go willingly anyway. (As this happens in other countries.)

Managers can pick before the announcement and then HR can do the actual if not enough people left willingly.

And there's always a chance of wrongful termination lawsuits...

... the real reason this is done this way is because that's the culture of these companies, mostly due to US culture (and labor laws are a synergic manifestation of this).

[_b]

People aren't interchangeable. The company might want to layoff 10%, but they don't want to layoff just any 10%. They will want to layoff people in positions and teams that they want to do away with, and to the extent some people are interchangeable, they would like to layoff those that are the least productive.

If you announce layoffs before telling people who will get cut, the people who tend to leave voluntarily are often those most able to get jobs elsewhere because they are high performers in positions that are hard to staff -- so exactly who the company wants to keep.