The sentence that caught my attention in Canva's restructuring announcement wasn't about severance details but about Slack.

"Everyone leaving Canva will continue to have access to Slack and Gmail until the end of the week, so they can choose when and how to share the news with their teams."

That might look like ordinary courtesy until you remember how the big tech layoffs of 2022 and 2023 went: Twitter staff who found out they were let go only when their accounts stopped working, Google’s 12,000 told by email with inboxes already closed. The instant lockout became the thing people expect, and the security playbooks still recommend it.

If you’ve ever been in the room with HR and legal planning layoff choreography, you know there was probably a discussion, maybe an argument, about legal exposure, risk of confidential information leaking, and what an upset employee might say if that window between being let go and losing official access was widened. Canva announced it anyway, and also asked the people staying on to respect the privacy of those conversations.

It’s an argument that usually gets lost, which is why the cold version is so familiar: a badge that unexpectedly stops working at 9:01, email access cut before the goodbye email can even go out, and no personal thanks to anyone.

On Wednesday morning, co-founder and CEO Melanie Perkins told employees a restructuring would affect 1,271 people, 22 percent of the workforce, through job losses, role changes and relocations. The company has not disclosed how many of the 1,271 will lose their jobs. The package is generous, at least six months' salary and continued healthcare where Canva already provides it, but the goodbye policy deserves attention of its own.

When someone loses a job, the company has already made the biggest decision for them: their last day, what happens to their team, what happens to the work and projects they care about. All of that is change done to a person, and it’s one of the hardest parts of losing a job. Choosing when and how to tell colleagues is one small piece they can still control, and Canva’s plan leaves that piece with them. As Perkins put it, “We also want to give everyone the time to process this news and say goodbye in their own way.” It costs the company some exposure, sure, but it buys the person a say in their own ending.

That doesn't make the layoff painless or mean every system should stay open. “There’s a risk” is a fair thing to say in that meeting with legal and HR. Someone could download a customer list, someone could post something ugly in a channel with thousands of people in it. Those risks are real, and each one deserves its own look. But an angry message and a stolen customer file are not the same problem. The trouble is that the conversation usually stops there, when it should keep going for another twenty minutes. Which access should shut off the moment the meeting ends? Maybe we draw a circle around customer records, financial systems, anything that touches a live product. Mail and Slack hold sensitive information too so this takes more thought than simply leaving apps on: what do people need to reach colleagues, what gets restricted or flagged, and who owns making it work? If someone writes something inappropriate, who reviews it and decides if it should be deleted?

Because the other side of this short-term risk is long-term reputation value. The people you let go this week are next year’s hiring managers, customers or clients and the people who stay are watching how it was done.

Canva's new Collective Fund extends the same idea past the goodbye. Departing employees can register interest in $10,000 grants to start a new venture of their own, and Canva says it won't take any ownership or equity in what they create. It makes room for more than one answer to "what next?", and there's something really beautifully credible about telling people the decision "does not diminish your talent," as the note does, then putting money behind that talent somewhere else.

Canva hasn’t invented the humane departure; in May 2020 Airbnb gave departing US and Canadian staff six days to "begin taking next steps and say goodbye." Squarespace, which also announced layoffs this week with at least 16 weeks' pay, is a fair comparison only so far: Business Insider reported its CEO's livestream to remaining staff ran about a minute with comments off.

Companies don’t typically treat a layoff like a brand decision while they’re in the middle of it; it’s treated as a financial and operational one. But ask anyone who’s been through one what they remember, and it will be focused on whether they got to say goodbye, and whether anyone meant it when they said thanks.

So before HR has a timeline, someone should ask the dumb-sounding question which is, in two years what should people be able to say about how we handled this, even if they never agree with the decision itself? That they heard it directly, they understood what happened next, got to say goodbye to their colleagues, and saw the support we promised in action. Those are the standards you can design a process around and the boring stuff falls in line behind them: how long the Slack access lasts, who decides which systems go dark and when, whether anyone is allowed to delete the angry post.

None of that feels like communications work and most of it belongs to other teams but somebody has to ask what it all says when one person lives through it in a single week, and that’s you. Because you can write the warmest goodbye note in the world, and if the email access is shut off before it can even be read, the access shut-off is the whole message.