Oracle’s layoff package puts severance benchmarking under the microscope
Oracle's mass layoff is being treated as a severance benchmarking moment — but HR leaders who think that's the real story are missing what's actually at stake for their function.
The news
Oracle is conducting what may be the largest tech layoff of 2025, and the terms of its severance package are now under the microscope — with HR leaders benchmarking Oracle’s offer against recent cuts at Block and other tech companies. HR Executive breaks down the details and the broader conversation happening among HR leaders trying to calibrate what “good” looks like right now.
My take
Severance benchmarking is a legitimate and necessary HR exercise. I’m not here to argue against it. But the framing of this moment — “what did Oracle do, and how does it compare?” — reveals a reflex I see constantly in HR functions that are still operating as administrators rather than strategists.
When a high-profile layoff drops, the instinct is to benchmark the output: weeks of pay, continuation of benefits, outplacement services. That’s a compliance mindset dressed up as strategy. The harder, more important question is what decisions happened upstream of the severance package — and whether HR had a seat at that table when they did.
I’ve worked with enough HR Tech buyers to know the pattern: HR gets looped in to manage the communication plan and calculate the liability. The workforce planning decisions — which roles are cut, which skills are retained, how the org will be restructured — those often happen in finance and operations. HR inherits the output and executes.
The companies where I’ve seen HR actually function as a strategic partner are the ones where the CHRO is in the room before the decision is made, not after. That means having the workforce data to make the case — which skills are scarce, which roles can’t be backfilled quickly, what the real cost of cutting a given population actually is. That’s where tools like workforce intelligence and people analytics platforms earn their keep. Not in running the severance calculation, but in informing the decision that makes severance necessary in the first place.
Benchmarking Oracle’s package is fine. But if that’s the extent of the strategic contribution HR is making right now, the function is still behind the table, not at it.
The so-what
I’d tell my clients — both the HR Tech vendors building workforce planning tools and the HR leaders evaluating them — that this is exactly the use case that justifies the investment. If your people analytics platform can only describe what happened, it’s not strategic infrastructure. It’s reporting.
The CHROs who come out of this layoff cycle with more influence are the ones who were already in the room when workforce decisions were being shaped. The ones running severance benchmarking after the fact are doing important work — but they’re doing it too late.
Severance benchmarking is a tactical necessity. Workforce intelligence before the decision is what makes HR a function with actual leverage.