Money for leaving instead of layoffs. When does it really work?
Microsoft is offering voluntary severance to around 60,000 people, while Skydance is combining a departure program at TVN with a requirement to work from the office. A scientific study suggests that paying people to leave can strengthen a team. In our view, that works only under one condition: the choice must be genuine.
Two programs in two days
On Monday, October 26, Microsoft announced a Voluntary Exit Offer for around 60,000 employees, or roughly one quarter of its global workforce. A day later, Wirtualne Media described an internal message from Skydance, the new owner of the group that includes TVN. The company is launching a voluntary departure program while also announcing a five-day-a-week office work policy across the organization.
Both companies talk about voluntariness. Researchers from Canadian universities, meanwhile, argue that paying people to leave can help an organization. We checked whether these three stories fit together. They do, but only partly.
What the study really showed
The article “Paying Employees to Quit: An Experimental Study of Sorting and Motivational Effects” was published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Management Accounting Research. The authors are Leslie Berger and Lan Guo of Wilfrid Laurier University, Kelsey Matthews of the University of Waterloo, and Bradley Ruffle of McMaster University. The researchers conducted a laboratory experiment and an online scenario-based experiment. So they did not study real employees at real companies, and these conclusions should be approached with caution.
An offer of money to leave had the strongest effect on people who identify moderately with the organization. Those with weak ties to the company tended to leave regardless of the incentive, while those with strong ties stayed even if they received the offer. In addition, people who rejected the offer later worked with greater effort than before. The authors see this as a way to address quiet quitting, meaning doing only the bare minimum required.
Usually, when we talk about financial incentives, we mean ways to retain employees, encourage them to work harder, or improve performance. That is why the idea of paying people to leave immediately raised an interesting question: under what circumstances could this be a sensible strategy for an organization?
Our takeaway from this study: the mechanism works because the offer is a real choice. Those who stay do so consciously, and that strengthens their commitment.
Classic pay-to-quit versus severance in restructuring
The examples that usually illustrate this idea have been around for years. Amazon adopted the program from Zappos and since 2014 has offered warehouse and customer service hourly workers “The Offer”: $2,000 in the first year, then $1,000 more for each additional year, up to a maximum of $5,000. Anyone who accepts the offer can never work at Amazon again. According to the company, fewer than 10 percent of eligible employees use it. Trainual, a maker of software for managing knowledge in companies, gives new hires $5,000 if after two weeks they decide it is not the right place for them.
This is a tool for continuous sorting, available to everyone and repeated regularly. It, too, can be abused: in 2021 Amazon tightened the program just before a union vote at its warehouse in Bessemer, which drew criticism.
Microsoft’s program is something else: a one-time severance offer at a time when the company has been watching costs for several years while making major investments in artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure. According to CNBC, the package matches the company’s standard severance, but the amount was not disclosed. The program covers employees in the US, India, Canada, and the UK at level 70 or below on the company’s internal scale, including teams in AI, Copilot, finance, human resources (HR), Xbox, and Windows. Marketing, commercial business, and security were excluded. The decision must be made by early December, and departure will take place on December 31.
The background is clear. In April, Microsoft offered a voluntary retirement program to 8,750 people in the US and, according to Amy Coleman, head of HR, around 30 percent of those eligible accepted it, which reduced the scale of planned layoffs. In July, the Xbox division laid off 3,200 people. Google has been taking a similar path since 2025. So a Microsoft employee is choosing between money now and the uncertainty of future cuts. It is a choice under pressure, but with clear rules: it is known who is affected and by when, and the package is supposed to match the company’s standard severance.
When voluntariness comes with a mandate
At Skydance, the proportions are different. The voluntary departure program was announced together with the end of hybrid work, under which some TVN24 teams had been working three days in the office and two from home. The company did not say how many people the program covers, what the terms are in individual countries, or when the new rules will take effect in Poland. Deadline describes the program as one of the first steps toward the more than $6 billion in savings announced from the Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery merger. Skydance had previously used the same combination at Paramount.
We are all in shock. Many people were working in a 3:2 format. Three days of in-person work and two remote.
Management justifies the change by building a single organizational culture, and we have no evidence that it is about anything else. Market data shows, however, that such a combination can be a deliberate tactic. In a BambooHR survey described by Fortune in 2025, one in four executives admitted they had hoped that a return-to-office mandate would cause some people to leave on their own. Nearly 40 percent of managers believed their company resorted to layoffs because too few people had left.
From the perspective of the study, that is a crucial difference. If someone takes severance because they cannot reconcile five days of commuting with childcare, the company is not sorting people by commitment, but by life situation. Those who have the best offers on the market also leave most easily. The “I refused, so I work harder” effect is then hard to predict, because those who stay did not choose the company; they accepted the new terms.
What a manager in Poland can learn from this
We did not find an independent expert who had assessed both programs, nor Polish data on the scale of voluntary departures. Still, comparing the study with both implementations suggests several conditions that the editorial team considers the minimum when planning such a program:
If a company introduces both an office-work mandate and a severance offer at the same time, employees will connect the two facts even if management does not. In that case, it is better to say plainly that it is restructuring than to sell it as flexibility.
Paying people to leave can work, but mainly where people really can stay on the same terms. When the offer is an escape hatch from a mandate meant to discourage someone, it is just a standard workforce reduction, only more expensive and less predictable.