"For injuries ought to be done all at one time, so that, being tasted less, they offend less; benefits ought to be given little by little, so that the flavour of them may last longer."
I've been in a situation where the company was laying people off incrementally over the span of 18 months. I hated going to work, didn't give a shit about the company, and I was not unique or alone in that opinion. If you have to lay people off, do it as quickly and with as much dignity as possible.
Morale wise it's probably better to do it in one large chunk instead of smaller servings where people are wondering if they are going to get cut in the next round.
But how would you know the one large chunk will be the only one? Layoffs are bad for morale regardless of how it is handled. I've been through both sides of a layoff and it wasn't fun either way.
> But how would you know the one large chunk will be the only one?
You can at a minimum guess from the size. Take for example this cut - roughly cutting 600 from 6-7000 means cutting 10%. Unless Blizzard is seriously inefficient, another such cut of 10+% would start doing major damage to operations. Hence, you know there probably won't be such a cut.
A big reason is that it's much easier to do from a legal perspective. Letting go of low performing people in a layoff is way easier than going through all the hoops of giving them warnings, putting them on probation, etc.
Also, a slow trickle of firings is just horrible for everyone. You have no idea if you are next, etc. A big layoff followed by a company meeting of "hey, we did a layoff because of X. There will be no additional layoffs as long as we hit our current goals."
http://www.constitution.org/mac/prince08.htm