When Rogers Communications Inc. confirmed this week it was offering voluntary buyouts to roughly 10,000 eligible employees — close to half of its 25,000-person workforce — the announcement landed as the largest such round in Canadian telecommunications in recent memory.
The company framed the program as a way to adjust its cost structure and let some employees decide whether to stay or begin a new chapter. Bell Canada's parent, BCE Inc., has used similar tools recently.
For HR executives, a key strategy in Rogers’ program may be how voluntary exit programs can trim unwanted employees to streamline the workforce and avoid getting caught up in legal quagmires, according to two employment lawyers.
Lior Samfiru, national managing co-partner at Samfiru Tumarkin in Toronto, says employers consistently reach for voluntary buyouts for cost reasons as well as the ability to shift workforce demographics without crossing legal lines.
On cost, Samfiru is blunt about why a buyout program is cheaper than a mass termination, particularly at companies like Rogers where long-tenured employees would otherwise command significant severance. “With a termination, the law dictates what you have to pay employees, and that amount can be very significant,” he says. “A lot of these employers like Rogers have long-service employees, and that severance can add up quickly with a buyout or a voluntary package — there's no requirement to pay anything, it's really what you and the employee agree to.”
The next rationale is more legally delicate — and perhaps the most strategically useful. Employers can’t lawfully push out older workers or weaker workers without cause, but a well-structured voluntary program tends to attract them disproportionately, says Samfiru.
“An employer can’t decide to just let people go because they're older — that would be a human rights violation and it's completely illegal,” he says. “But if they offer voluntary exit packages, older employees who may be closer to retirement are going to be more likely to accept than, say, someone who’s younger and in the beginning of their career.”
Christopher Sinal, a management-side labour and employment lawyer at Siskinds Law Firm in London, Ont., frames the strategy as a balancing act between legal obligations and operational capacity, where a broad layoff can leave an employer short-staffed, while working-notice arrangements may not be feasible for cash-strapped businesses.
“A voluntary exit package allows you to potentially entice those people who may be thinking about leaving anyway, which at any time in a larger organization is going to be a percentage of your workforce,” Sinal told HRD Canada in a previous interview. He adds that "making the voluntary exit package available does not necessarily mean that you are guaranteeing that everyone who wants I think advantage of it can."
For HR leaders, the real upside goes beyond severance math. Sinal points to a pattern in which the first to raise their hands are often employees the organization would quietly have liked to move along anyway.
"A lot of times when you start this process, the initial takers are ones who may not have been your top performers and may not have been people that were particularly satisfied at their job to begin with," he says. “And rather than having to go through the process of potentially transitioning them out of employment with all of the potential pitfalls that go along with that, you in fact have been able to end that relationship that may not have been particularly productive, but in a way where everyone’s dignity is intact.”
In a voluntary program, the employer must forecast take-up rather than dictate it, and Samfiru cautions the math can go sideways.
"While Rogers may have offered this to half their employees, I'm sure they don’t want half of their employees to be gone,” he says. “They probably couldn't function in that situation, but they know that a significant amount is not going to accept it.”
According to an August 2025 survey by Mercer, the average voluntary turnover rate in Canada is 10.2 per cent. National Bank analyst Adam Shine wrote in a note to clients following Rogers’ announcement that it would be “unlikely” that the actual number of Rogers employees who take the offer would approach the number who received it, reported the Financial Post.
“Rogers has done voluntary programs in the past, with the scale/uptake of these always well below what’s otherwise being implied by and extrapolated,” wrote Shine, noting that Rogers’ voluntary departure program was restricted to certain employees.
“One of the most important things is making it so that the program is bold and underlined voluntary,” Sinal says. “It needs to be something that you’re making available to employees if they want it.”
Even a well-priced package can backfire if employees read it as a warning shot. Sinal says generational expectations shape how voluntary programs are received, with older workers often viewing them as a retirement off-ramp and younger employees more likely to read them as a sign of trouble. The remedy lies in groundwork done before any announcement — and in tailoring offers to what employees value, whether pensionable service, extended health benefits or long-term disability coverage, he says.
