After redundancies: what happens to the people who stay

On Monday morning the office was quiet in a way it had never been before. Three desks had been cleared; on a fourth there was still a pot plant nobody had taken home. At nine a message came from management: “The difficult decisions are behind us. With the remaining team we move forward stronger.” Someone opened a window. No one said anything. Then everyone got on with their work, as if it were an ordinary Monday.

Redundancies are mostly discussed from the point of view of those who lost their jobs — and rightly so. Their loss is the greatest and the most visible. But there is another group that is talked about far less: the people who stay. On paper, nothing has happened to them. They have a job, a salary, their own desk. And yet many of them, in the weeks after the layoffs, feel worse than they expected — guilty, frightened, angry, empty. Often they don’t know why, and they don’t allow themselves to feel bad, because after all they “were the lucky ones”.

In this post I want to look at what is happening to them. As a therapist in training in relational family therapy, I see a workplace as a system — much like a family. When several members suddenly drop out of a system, it changes for everyone, including those who stay exactly where they were.

Who the “survivors” are

In work psychology this state has come to be known as layoff survivor syndrome. From the 1980s onwards, the psychologist Joel Brockner and his colleagues systematically studied how employees who remain respond to redundancies. The consultant David Noer, in his book on healing after layoffs, described what he called “layoff survivor sickness”: a mix of anger, guilt, fear, sadness and mistrust that can last long after the offices have been rearranged.

The word “survivor” sounds dramatic, but it captures something essential: redundancies are not something that happens only to those who leave. They happen to the system. And the system remembers.

Research on the consequences of downsizing is strikingly consistent in showing that those who stay do not come away unscathed. One of the most telling studies is a Finnish study of municipal employees led by Jussi Vahtera. Among permanent employees who remained in organisations after major downsizing, deaths from cardiovascular disease in the following four years were roughly twice as high as among employees in organisations where there had been no downsizing. The same research group had earlier found that after major downsizing, sickness absence rises among those who stay — linked to having more work, less control over it and more uncertainty.

A review of research on job insecurity by Magnus Sverke and colleagues paints a similar picture from another angle: feeling that your job isn’t safe is associated with poorer mental and physical health, lower job satisfaction and weaker commitment to the organisation. After redundancies, that feeling is almost inevitable — even for those who have never been told they might be next.

These findings don’t mean that everyone who stays will become ill. They mean that the reaction you may be feeling is to be expected. It is not overreacting, and it is not ingratitude.

Guilt: why me and not him

One of the most common feelings among those who stay is guilt. Why did my colleague with two small children and a mortgage have to go, while I stayed? Why her, after twenty years here? Did I stay because I was better at getting on people’s good side — and what does that say about me?

This guilt is closely related to what we call Survivor guilt: when it hurts because you were the one spared. It doesn’t come from anyone having done anything wrong. It comes from the sense that luck has been handed out unfairly, and from a need to somehow balance the books. You’ll find a short explanation of what guilt is and isn’t in the knowledge base under guilt.

Brockner and colleagues noticed that the reaction of those who stay is especially strong when they identify with the people who were let go — when they were close, did the same work or are similar in age and position — and when they feel those who left received too little. So guilt is not a sign of weakness. It is a sign that you cared about the people you worked with.

Guilt can also lead to behaviour that doesn’t look like guilt: overworking, avoiding former colleagues, a sense that you mustn’t allow yourself any enjoyment at work because that would be disrespectful to them.

Fear: who’s next

The other big feeling is fear. If it happened once, it can happen again. Every meeting management calls without explanation becomes a threat. Every email with “a quick chat” in the subject line makes your heart race. People start reading managers’ faces, looking for signs in who was invited to lunch and who wasn’t.

This state of constant alertness to danger is called hypervigilance. It is a useful response when danger is real and short-lived. When it lasts for weeks and months, it is exhausting — the body is always on standby, sleep becomes shallower, concentration crumbles.

Fear often leads to behaviour that looks like dedication from the outside: people stay later, don’t complain, accept every extra task. Management sometimes reads this as proof that the “team is stronger”. In reality, it is often a team that is afraid.

Fairness: how it was done matters almost as much as what

One of the most consistent findings of Brockner’s research is that those who stay respond not only to the fact that there were redundancies, but to how they were carried out. Were the criteria clear? Did people hear in person or by email? Did anyone get to hear the reasons? Did those who left receive support? Did managers treat them with dignity?

When those who stay feel the process was fair, the consequences are milder — even when the decision itself was painful. When they feel it was unfair, something is lost that is hard to restore: trust. Aneil Mishra and Gretchen Spreitzer described how trust in management and a sense of fairness are exactly what determine whether those who stay become more hopeful or more cynical — as the diagram above shows.

This matters because it explains why two workplaces can respond completely differently after the same number of redundancies. It isn’t only about how many people left, but about what story was left behind.

An invisible contract, broken

The psychologist Denise Rousseau described how, alongside the written contract, we also have a psychological contract with our employer: unwritten expectations about what we owe each other. “If I do good work, I’ll be safe.” “If I’m loyal, they’ll be loyal to me.” Most people never put these expectations into words. They only become visible when they break.

Redundancies often break them. It is especially painful when the company used to say that “we’re all one family” — I wrote about why that sentence at work is a warning sign in “We’re a family”. When the “family” lets a third of its members go overnight, those who stay lose more than colleagues. They lose the story of where they stand.

From a systemic point of view, something else happens too. A system can’t tolerate an empty place. The work of those who left is shared out among those who remain, often without discussion. Someone takes on the role of the person who used to calm tensions. Someone else becomes the one who carries everyone’s anger. Roles are redistributed without anyone choosing them. I described a similar dynamic, on a smaller scale, in When a colleague you leaned on leaves.

Grief no one permits

When several colleagues leave at once, it is a loss. You lose the people you had coffee with, joked with, got through crises with. You lose the workplace as it was. But there is no ritual for this loss. No funeral, no condolences, often not even a farewell gathering. Management wants to “move on” as quickly as possible. Those who stay feel they have no right to grieve, since they are the ones who kept their jobs.

We call this kind of grief disenfranchised — I wrote about how it shows itself in The grief nobody acknowledges. Grief that isn’t lived through doesn’t disappear. It shows up as irritability, tiredness, cynicism or a sense of emptiness that is hard to connect to what happened.

How it sounds in conversation

This is how a conversation in a session a few weeks after redundancies might sound (composite, not a real person):

“I don’t know why I’m even here. Nothing happened to me. I kept my job.”
“And yet you came.”
“Yes. I can’t sleep. I’m always angry with my wife, with the kids. At work I laugh and do the work of two.”
“Of two?”
“Of Mark’s. I took over his projects. Sometimes I open his folder and something just tightens.”
“What tightens?”
A long silence. “That I’m here and he isn’t. And that I’m scared I’ll be next.”

In a conversation like this, a person often names both feelings together for the first time — guilt and fear — and notices that they are opposites only on the surface. Both are saying the same thing: the ground beneath me is no longer solid.

When work comes home

What isn’t said at work often comes home. A partner who wasn’t in the office doesn’t understand why you’re so tense, since “you kept your job, didn’t you”. And you may not dare tell them how frightened you are, so as not to worry them — or because you feel you have no right to complain.

So the tension from work spills into the relationship at home without anyone saying where it comes from. I wrote about how the stress of a crisis at work carries over into family life in A crisis at work and at home: the stress you carry through the door.

It helps to tell the people at home what happened — not only the facts, but also how you are. Your partner can’t carry your fear for you, but they can carry it with you, if they know about it.

Exercise: a review after redundancies

If in recent weeks or months you have stayed on at a company after redundancies, take fifteen minutes for this exercise. It works best in writing.

1. Write down the names of the people who left, and next to each, one thing you will miss. This is a small farewell ritual that perhaps didn’t happen at work.
2. Name the feelings you have — guilt, fear, anger, sadness, relief. They can all be there at once, and none of them is wrong.
3. Separate facts from assumptions. Write down what you actually know about the future of the company and your own position, and separately, what you are only imagining or hearing through rumours.
4. Write down what work you have taken over from those who left — and whether anyone has talked to you about it. If not, think about how you might raise it with your manager.
5. Choose one person you will talk to this week about how you are — a colleague, your partner or a friend.

The exercise won’t change what happened. But it can help what you are carrying find words — so that you aren’t left alone with something no one in the workplace may dare to say out loud.

Where this view isn’t enough

I want to be clear about the limits of what I have written.

Not every reaction is a syndrome. Some people genuinely feel mainly relief after redundancies; some see an opportunity. That isn’t coldness, and it isn’t necessarily denial. We respond to losses in different ways, and I wouldn’t want anyone to read this post as instructions on what they ought to feel.

Sometimes the right answer is to leave. If after redundancies it becomes clear that there is no trust left in the company, that the workload is permanently unbearable or that management’s values don’t match yours, therapy won’t make it good for you there. It can help you decide more calmly — not help you adapt to something that is harming you.

Legal questions belong elsewhere. If you are worried about your rights, whether the process was lawful or what happens if another wave comes, the right place to go is a trade union, an employment lawyer or, in Slovenia, the Labour Inspectorate (Inšpektorat RS za delo). I can’t answer those questions in this post.

When to see a doctor. If sleeplessness, low mood or anxiety last for several weeks and make everyday life difficult, talk to your GP — it may be depression or an anxiety disorder that needs a professional assessment. If you are having thoughts that it would be better if you weren’t here, call the crisis line Klic v duševni stiski on 01 520 99 00 in Slovenia (every day from 7 pm to 7 am) or the Samaritans helpline Zaupni telefon Samarijan on 116 123 in Slovenia (24 hours a day), and in an emergency 112.

And one more thing: this post is about the people who stay among the staff. Those who have to make and announce decisions about redundancies carry a burden of their own — I wrote about it in Redundancies, crises and moral distress.

What to remember

• Redundancies don’t only happen to those who leave — they happen to the whole system, including those who stay.
• Guilt and fear are common and expected among those who stay — they are not a sign of ingratitude or weakness.
• How those who stay respond depends strongly on whether the process felt fair.
• Losing colleagues is a loss, even when there is no ritual for it — and grief that isn’t lived through shows up elsewhere.
• It helps to name your feelings, separate facts from rumours and talk to someone about it — at work or at home.