I was at a company that laid off a few dozen people on my team when things went south at the end of '08 (many more got the sack worldwide; I'm being intentional

I was at a company that laid off a few dozen people on my team when things went south at the end of '08 (many more got the sack worldwide; I'm being intentionally vague on the company as it's irrelevant to the story). We were all remote employees so none of us saw anything; the only way I knew it was going on was the flood of "you safe?" messages I got over Skype. I figured something was about to happen, though; at 9pm the night before the layoffs, the CEO sent a mail calling a worldwide all-hands conference call for what would have been the day after the layoffs took place. People's direct managers weren't the ones to make the calls to the unlucky employees, that came from their manager's manager, someone with whom we normally had no day to day interaction. It wasn't until the next day that we heard official word of what went on from company leadership. During the all hands call we were told something along the lines of "we made some very deep cuts so that we shouldn't need to do this again." So it came as a surprise when one morning a few months later, I get half a dozen more "you ok?" messages. This time nobody heard a word from upper management, and radio silence from my super. Finally three days later she mailed to say that there have been layoffs and she herself was one of them. It did a great job of inspiring confidence within the team. Out of the people who were left, quite a few jumped ship over the following couple months and joined a startup that looks poised to eat this company's lunch. Moral of the story: don't make promises like "this isn't going to happen again" if you have no way to keep them. Communicate immediately, especially when people are geographically spread out -- the rumor mill actually runs a lot hotter when the "survivors" only have email and chat to keep in touch. On the other hand, if you want to destroy morale and push your best employees to start polishing up their resumes, by all means follow the above recipe.