Navigating Corporate Survivor’s Guilt: How to Handle Company Layoffs
How can organizations be employee-experience-focused and manage layoffs better?
In this article, Aaron Rubens, CEO and co-founder of Kudoboard, discusses how companies can proactively plan for layoffs by establishing support systems where employees can check in with one another and forge connections with those that remain at the company.
Amazon, Google, Paypal, and Meta recently underwent new rounds of mass layoffs affecting tens of thousands of workers, with Amazon’s cuts being referred to as “the largest job cull in its history.” However, they are just a few of the many tech giants to take layoffs to the extreme in recent months—Salesforce, Goldman Sachs, Twitter, and Microsoft also joined the fray, as did Yahoo (laying off 20% of its workforce), Zoom (shedding 15% of their staff), and Dell (letting go of 5% of its workers) all in early February. This latest sweep brings the total to 93,000 employees having been terminated from over 154 tech companies this year alone.
These layoffs affect more than just bottom-line profits. Company layoffs can create serious personnel problems that eat away at the heart and soul of an organization. Understandably, the people that were let go must manage a laundry list of financial and emotional pressures, from worrying about paying their bills to a loss of self-esteem and a deep sense of shame or failure. But those left behind who still have their jobs face different types of challenges and stressors that can be just as destabilizing professionally and personally.
The Mixed Blessing of Job Survival
When large numbers of employees are laid off (or even smaller numbers), the existing employees commonly wrestle with a litany of negative feelings, just like their jobless peers do. Companies need to understand that layoffs will cause a range of emotions in these remaining workers. In addition to missing their now absent work friends, individuals who weren’t fired may be concerned about an increased workload for themselves and their team members. They might also be worried that subsequent rounds of layoffs could affect them and hurt their livelihood.
Moreover, many still-working employees can get bogged down in an alarming sense of guilt for remaining employees. The experience can lead “surviving” staff members to become paralyzed and ineffective for fear of making a mistake that would put them on the chopping block next—or cause them to launch into overdrive and overwork in an attempt to prove their value. There’s a term for this state: corporate survivor’s guilt.
Unfortunately, this condition for the still-employed isn’t rare. According to a report by Myers-Briggs, roughly one-third of workers said they felt guilty about continuing to hold a job when others at their company had been laid off. This phenomenon can significantly impact employee morale and company culture, yet businesses often fail to realize that many of those who “make the cut” by not getting slashed from the company will indeed suffer from survivor’s guilt. This is especially true when workers believe their laid-off colleagues didn’t deserve it.
See More: Workforce Experience: Why Companies Need to Rethink Their Strategies
From Guilt to Gratitude
The biggest mistake a company can make when laying off employees is ignoring the remaining employees. It’s imperative to take care of the employees being let go and do it with respect and generosity. But many employers stop there, thinking the problems have been solved. If that happens, the employees who still work for you can start to experience negative feelings about the company and begin questioning their roles and what they want.
Rather than standing by passively as company culture gets thwarted, leaders can take proactive measures to replace survivors’ guilt with gratitude in the wake of company layoffs. To this end, managers and human resources need to establish support systems where employees can check in with one another and forge stronger bonds with those who remain employed. Enabling deeper connections within the company helps employees to stay engaged and happy within the organization. The goal should be to create corporate channels for employees to vent and offer support to former colleagues.
Any HR rep can tell you that it’s rare for employees to bring their dissatisfaction to leadership. Unless it’s a “code red” situation, peer-to-peer support systems are far more effective in the wake of layoffs than management-to-employee systems, as the former are orchestrated laterally rather than from the top down. Setting up ways to share appreciation and create connections within the company is vital after layoffs—for example, through online peer-to-peer shout-outs to say “thank you” and “farewell” to colleagues before they depart. Facilitating these critical communications is a great way to empower employees to share their appreciation for outgoing coworkers and even assist them with resumes and referrals.
See More: Why Leaders Must Harness IT’s Power in Hybrid Work Environments
Building a Culture of Resilience, Collaboration and Gratitude
By helping employees replace negative feelings about their former colleagues’ fate with positivity, appreciation, and rituals of gratitude to and between employees, the organization can leverage these difficult moments to authentically strengthen the employee ecosystem and culture, stabilizing individual and team morale. The practice of gratitude is transformative in the workplace. It’s not overstating the case to say that gratitude is the antidote to corporate survivor’s guilt. Organizations should take careful steps to create a culture of gratitude and appreciation in their workplace, leveraging tools like peer-to-peer online shout-outs, both before and after layoffs. Anyone in a management role should provide specific gratitude for employees by name, publicly, to keep everyone connected to the company mission.
Leaders should also make themselves more available during layoffs to provide moral support, whether by maintaining an open-door policy throughout the transition or personally participating in group sharing to build trust and psychological safety. Empathetic leaders can regularly share their personal perspectives, hold office hours, and try to be more present and approachable in the office or online, such as via Slack or another messaging app. And while it may at times feel challenging, leadership should also commit to being as honest and transparent as possible during layoffs. Leaders who beat around the bush or offer stale platitudes won’t be trusted by the smaller group of employees they’ve retained and now must depend on more than ever.
The bottom line is organizations have a choice about how to handle the task of people management around layoffs—on the front end as well as the back. By being proactive and creating channels for communication, showing appreciation and gratitude to your employees, layoffs can end up with the silver lining of bolstering team morale and company culture rather than derailing it.
Were you happy with how layoffs and the ensuing corporate survivor’s guilt were handled in your organization? Share with us on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
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