You explained the decision. Canva also dated the wait.

On 3 November everyone at Canva got the same email from its co-founder and CEO, Melanie Perkins. 1,271 people, 22% of the company, would be affected. For some that would mean a different role, for some a request to relocate to one of the company’s hubs, and for some, leaving.

Nobody reading it knew which of those, if any, was theirs.

Two weeks ago I read Netflix’s layoff memo looking for what it left each group of readers without. Four things were missing there: when people would know, why it was happening, who to ask, and what their manager could say. I put Canva’s memo through the same reading. This time the results are different.

One email, and nobody knows yet

There is no way round the not knowing. Unless you announce names, one memo goes to everyone at once, and everyone reads it before the conversations that will tell them where they stand. Canva’s does that too. It explains, then lists the support for those leaving, and only in its last two paragraphs speaks to “everyone continuing” and to “those who will be leaving”.

Whatever you write, people finish it still not knowing. What the memo can choose is what it does with the wait.

What it does with the wait

It mentions the wait out loud. Conversations will happen at different times in different countries, and people will go on working beside colleagues who may be leaving: “you may not know exactly how your team is changing straight away.”

Almost everything not known yet gets a date. Leads will share more about each area “by the end of the week”. The whole company meets on 10 November “to talk through these changes, answer questions”. Meetings for each part of the company follow from 11 November.

Those leaving have until 14 December to apply for the US$10,000 grants the company is offering anyone who wants to start something of their own.

Questions have somewhere to go. Everyone affected gets an invitation to a meeting with a senior leader in their area. There are answers to common questions, with the line “There’s no need to read through everything right now”. The company meeting takes the rest.

“We’ve asked Org Leads to wait until after this to bring their teams together.” Managers can say what is changing in their area, but no team sits down to talk it through until the whole company has.

The people leaving get a say in how the news travels. They keep Slack and email until the end of the week, “so they can choose when and how to share the news with their teams”.

Non-critical meetings are cancelled for the rest of the week, and anyone who needs a day off can take it without it counting as leave.

The day off is the kind line. Everything around it is a schedule of when you’ll know.

The reason, on the day

The reason is in the memo. Growth slowed this year for the first time in a decade, and the company had grown into too many handovers between Product, Growth and Platform. Then it says how the decisions were made: mission and goals first, then the structures, skills and places those need, and “only then did we look at what this would mean for individual roles”.

Everyone at Canva reads that line in the same email as the news, before anyone knows whether an invite is coming for them.

At Netflix the reason came six days after the memo, on the earnings call, to analysts.

The comparison needs two cautions. Netflix is listed and Canva is private, and a listed company can be limited in what it tells its people before it tells the market. Canva’s change also touches 22% of the company, where Netflix cut about 6%, which on its own asks for more explaining.

What it still leaves open

I also ran the memo through Drift, which we use with leaders to read a message before it goes out. It found four places where readers still have to guess.

The invitation is the same for everyone affected. “Those impacted will receive a calendar invite for an individual meeting with a senior leader.” As the memo describes it, the person whose role is changing, the one being asked to move and the one leaving all get it, so receiving it tells you that you are affected and not how. With teams in 37 countries, the memo says, the timing “may vary”. For some, that could be days between the invite and the answer.

Nothing says when no invite means you are safe. Most readers will not be affected, and the memo does not tell them the moment they can stop checking their calendar.

The people asked to move get the least. The people leaving have a section of their own and a closing paragraph, and the people staying have a closing paragraph too. Anyone asked to relocate gets “comprehensive support”, with no detail, no deadline, and nothing about what happens if they say no.

And the change that reaches most of the people staying, whatever happens to their team, comes without settled terms or a date for settling them: from January, “most” hybrid staff in the office “around 2 to 3 days” a week, “depending on what makes sense in your area”.

I don’t know how Canva’s people read it. The company meeting is on 10 November, the day this goes out, and it may close some of these gaps. But each one was there to see in the text before it was sent.

What to take from it

The severance is generous and the tone is careful, and in a layoff memo those get the attention. What sets this one apart is that it explains why in the same email as the news, and puts a date on nearly everything its readers do not know yet.

Before your next important message to your people goes out, list what each reader will not know when they finish it, and next to each one, the day they will.

Now run it on yours

Drift does that reading for you. Paste in the next announcement before it goes out, and it shows you what each group of readers is left without, and where they could take it differently from what you mean → run Drift .

Find out where you stand

Take a Snapshot : six questions about your last high stakes moment in front of your people, to see where your message may be drifting.