This behavior is strongly incentivized by the fact that recruitment and on boarding and training costs don't show up in the quarter, or maybe even the fiscal year, where layoffs are made. You can also hide a bit of age and wage discrimination in layoffs and intentionally dumb down your organization to goose up the quarter a bit more.

Quarterly financial reporting is an obvious target for a rethink. Managers get instantaneous readings from dashboards, but they also like the room for shenanigans that quarterly reporting to shareholders enables. It's going to be hard to get management to give up information asymmetry.