I don't know who the audience was overall, but anyone with a supervisory title in my org (consisting of all management) was invited to one of several calls over the next couple weeks. I went to it today. The call was run by Equifax, who contracts with AT&T to, among other things, reduce the liability AT&T has for paying unemployment to workers who part with the company.
What I got out of the call was: NEVER volunteer in writing for ANYTHING regarding leaving the company without being extremely careful. Even if there is a surplus and you are given an "interest in leaving" form, don't sign it, because - as they host of the call said - Equifax WILL fight any subsequent unemployment claims on behalf of AT&T. They may not win all the claims (because the state unemployment agency ultimately determines eligibility and who pays it), but Equifax/AT&T absolutely will fight them.
They bragged that they saved the company $31M in claims just last year.
The company very carefully words such interest-in-leaving documents, saying, you MAY be eligible for unemployment if you sign this form, blah blah blah. But they are saying that because they know that any future unemployment claims by you (where AT&T would be required to pay the unemployment benefit in whole or in part), will be fought vigorously by Equifax.
They also stressed that we should document any conversations about an employee leaving. For example, take two employees. Employee A purposely underperforms. S/he sits on work, blows past deadlines, doesn't even try hard. Employee B tries really hard, but s---s at his/her job. S/he is a bad programmer, can't "get" Excel, whatever.
For purposes of unemployment, Employee A technically should not receive unemployment, and Employee B should. HOWEVER, it's extremely difficult to prove that Employee A was negligently/maliciously/purposely bad at his/her job. So any documentation about "wanting to leave" from Employee A needs to be diligently documented and saved. If Employee A threatens to quit, you want to get them to commit to a last day in writing (email), so that it can be used against them later.
Most of the managers on the call were horrified. Few of us, I presume, have Employee A types anymore (not since about 10 surpluses ago) and I would be surprised if any have many Employee B types either. Maybe I'm lucky, but they wouldn't last very long if I had any say in it.
I'm not criticizing the need to document things carefully, not by any means. I was just shocked by the suggestion that we should expect our employees to be deceitful and menacing in their intent to claim unemployment at some undetermined future date, and we need to diligently prevent that.