Has the era of the mega-layoff come to an end, replaced by the start of the more humane “buyout boom”? That’s how announcements from Microsoft Corp. and Skydance Corp. offering employees voluntary exits on the same day are being interpreted.

But that may be where the parallel ends. Both companies are trying to manage their headcounts, but Microsoft is also trying to manage its image. Under CEO Satya Nadella, the tech giant spent the last dozen years working to shed its reputation as a cutthroat place to work and instead cultivate a more empathetic and employee-friendly culture. As mass layoffs have become something of the norm across the industry, Nadella may see leaning into that distinction as a competitive advantage.

“This could be the company trying to reestablish what made them successful over the last decade,” says Laszlo Bock, a CEO coach and Google’s one-time human resources chief. “They’re tiptoeing back to a bit of a different culture.”

That tone comes through in Microsoft’s announcement, which stresses employees’ agency. The buyout is a “choice” they can make with the company’s support and resources, that it’s a way to “shape their next chapter,” that the company is providing “opportunities for our own people to grow and contribute.”Compare that to Skydance, where management is using buyouts as the carrot in a traditional carrot-and-stick approach to employee reductions. After combining with Warner Bros. Discovery, the company wants to shrink its workforce for the usual post-merger reasons: getting rid of redundancies and cutting costs as it works toward $6 billion in annual savings to pay down debt.

Skydance’s memo to its workforce is focused on what the company needs to “win” and what it expects from employees, which includes everyone back in the office five days a week. The takeaway is that those that don’t like it can leave: “We recognize that not everyone will see their future here,” the memo reads. Because the company has cost-saving targets it needs to hit, there is also the looming sense that if you don’t take buyout you’re offered, you may very well be targeted for a layoff down the line.

But at this point there’s no sign of the stick at Microsoft, only the carrot. That feels intentional, especially since Microsoft has shown it’s perfectly capable of doing a layoff when it wants to. Last spring the company let go of about 6,000 employees, or about 3% of its workforce, and another 4,800, or 2.1%, as recently as July.

But it’s also experimented with voluntary retirement, giving that option to about 7% of its workforce in April. More than 30% of those eligible took the deal. Now, it’s offering voluntary buyouts to a massive 60,000 employees, which is about a quarter of its workforce. (Skydance hasn’t said how many employees have received buyout offers.) With a buyout, and especially one of Microsoft’s scale, employers are making a bet that all of their best, most desirable employees won’t be the ones who leave. But it’s a calculated risk in such a low-hire economy. Microsoft’s CFO has said the company expects at most 3,000 to take it.

Microsoft may be willing to sacrifice some control over who leaves because it sees the possibility of a different kind of payoff. The massive headcount reductions that have roiled the tech industry have given employees more evidence that tech companies are no longer interested in portraying themselves as warm and fuzzy employers. But that has long been part of Nadella’s personal brand. When he became Microsoft CEO in 2014, he intentionally shifted the company away from its aggressive, take-no-prisoners mentality toward a more collaborative and compassionate approach. It worked: When Nadella took over, Microsoft’s market value was about $300 billion; today, it’s approaching $4 trillion.

But the company seems in need of a reset. For the last year, the stock has languished. The share price is down about 3% and has underperformed both the S&P 500 and its peers in the S&P 500 Information Technology Index. Microsoft’s shift toward a more humane way of shedding employees may just be an attempt to double down on a strategy centered around empathy that worked for the company in the past.

That’s not to say that more layoffs won’t be in the company’s future. In fact, Bock thinks it’s almost certain Microsoft will have them in the next year. But for now, management seems to be making a different kind of calculus. In a tech industry that has spent the past few years telling workers that they’re expendable, there’s inherent value in being the employer that asks people nicely to leave before it just shows them the door.