Well, I have a short answer and a long answer to this. The long answer would be more or less an essay, and involve a lot of fairly far-left (at least from an American perspective) views, like "we should be basing our society and our work culture on the benefit of the workers, and of all humanity, rather than the corporate overlords" and "we need to radically restructure our corporate hierarchies, which would lead to it being much less likely that there would either be "layoffs" as we know them now, or a small executive class that could conceal their imminent occurrence from the rest of the company".
But for today, I think I will stick with the short answer, which points in the same direction, but is smaller in scope. I think it can be most clearly expressed in two parts:
First, we need to work on reducing the toxic levels of deceit and secrecy in our corporate culture. Hide everyone's salary, hide the metrics we're evaluated on, hide how poorly the company is doing—all of this is designed to make things either more convenient or more profitable for the executives and shareholders, at the expense of the workers, and at the expense of basic honesty. I'm not saying everyone needs to be 100% open about everything all the time; that's fairly obviously too extreme. But the company itself (and, by extension, its executives and other core officials) needs to be more transparent with its workers, especially for as long as it is effectively their sole source of income.
Second (and very much related), we need to find ways to break the mindset that the stock price is all. An awful lot of the deceit and secrecy—and, in fact, many of the other detrimental behaviors of companies and their executives—stem from the fact that the people at the top are obsessed with making sure the share price keeps growing. I think the way the stock price is treated by execs—and the stock/option-heavy compensation packages they often get—were probably based in something helpful and rational to start with (operating under the assumption that a higher stock price means a healthier company), but to the extent that that's true, it's fallen victim to Goodhart's Law ("any measure that becomes a target ceases to be a good measure").
How do we do these things? Haven't a clue, honestly. Our system is majorly messed up at every level right now, and chock full of feedback loops, so nearly anywhere you try to start will be resisted strongly without first improving things somewhere else...but conversely, any place you can make a difference will start to make it a little easier to improve things elsewhere.
