Sep20
When an organisation announces redundancies, there is an obvious assumption about who is affected. Those who lose their jobs face uncertainty about their income, career and future, while those who remain are, at least superficially, the fortunate ones.
Yet that distinction is psychologically more complicated than it first appears. For employees who keep their jobs, redundancy can bring relief, but it can also bring guilt, grief, anxiety and concern that their own position may only be temporarily secure. In a contact centre, where remaining employees may simultaneously be expected to absorb additional workload while continuing to manage the emotional demands of customer interactions, the consequences can be particularly significant.
This is sometimes described as survivor syndrome, referring to the range of psychological and behavioural responses experienced by employees who remain after organisational downsizing. It is not simply a case of people feeling sorry for colleagues who have left. Redundancy can alter how survivors perceive their organisation, their colleagues, their own job security and even the work they are being asked to do.
The important point is that the organisational process and the psychological process do not necessarily finish at the same time.
The assumption is often that surviving a redundancy programme should bring relief. In reality, humans are remarkably good at holding contradictory emotions. An employee can be relieved that their mortgage is still affordable while simultaneously grieving for colleagues who have lost their livelihoods. They can be grateful to have retained their role while feeling guilty that equally capable colleagues have not. Some experience what psychologists describe as survivor guilt, a feeling that they have somehow benefited from an event in which others have suffered.
Guilt, however, is only part of the picture.
Redundancies can fundamentally change how employees perceive the organisation itself. The workplace is built on an implicit psychological contract. Employees do not simply exchange labour for pay; they develop expectations around fairness, stability, reciprocity and trust. A redundancy programme can challenge several of those expectations simultaneously.
Employees may begin asking themselves: if the organisation could let experienced colleagues go yesterday, why would I be safe tomorrow? Was the process genuinely fair? Does loyalty actually matter here? What does good performance mean if organisational circumstances can override it?
Even when redundancies are financially unavoidable, the psychological contract can therefore be damaged. Employees may accept the commercial rationale while still questioning what the decision tells them about their own future. For contact centre leaders, this means that explaining why redundancies were necessary does not necessarily resolve the uncertainty they create. People are also likely to judge whether the process was fair, consistent and respectful.
There is also a tendency to think about redundancy as something that happens to the people who leave, while overlooking the losses experienced by those who remain.
Employees may have lost trusted colleagues, friends, mentors, sources of expertise and informal support. In a contact centre, where teams can develop strong social relationships through the shared experience of handling difficult customers and demanding workloads, those losses can be particularly significant. A colleague who knew how to resolve a complicated customer issue may have gone, along with the person who could be relied upon during a difficult shift. The team itself may have lost part of its identity.
Even those who remain employed are, in many ways, grieving.
The practical reality can compound this because work rarely disappears when people do. Responsibilities are redistributed across fewer employees, often without additional resources or sufficient time to adapt. This is consistent with Stevan Hobfoll's Conservation of Resources theory, which suggests that stress can arise when people lose valued resources, face the threat of losing them, or invest resources without receiving an adequate return.
After redundancy, employees may have lost social support, predictability, expertise and a sense of security while simultaneously being asked to invest more energy to compensate for reduced headcount. In a contact centre, that might mean handling more interactions, working additional hours or taking on unfamiliar responsibilities while customers remain just as demanding.
The organisation may have reduced its workforce, but it has not necessarily reduced the work.
This helps explain why employees who remain after redundancy often become hypervigilant. Rather than assuming the organisation has made its decisions and they can return to normal, they may begin monitoring leadership announcements, budgets, recruitment freezes, workload changes or seemingly minor shifts in organisational language for signs that another round of cuts is coming.
Humans are remarkably good at detecting potential threats. The difficulty is that workplace threats rarely have a clear beginning and end. Employees can remain uncertain for weeks or months about whether another restructuring exercise is being considered.
When people remain in this heightened state, attention can shift from performing their role to monitoring risk. Working memory can become less efficient, decision-making can narrow and creativity can decline as people become more risk-averse. Attention that might otherwise be directed towards solving customer problems, identifying improvements or learning new skills can instead be diverted towards assessing potential threats.
This creates a tension for organisations. Following a restructure, leaders often want employees to demonstrate greater flexibility, innovation and ownership. Yet prolonged uncertainty can encourage people to focus on protecting what they have rather than experimenting with what might be possible.
For contact centres, that has direct implications for customer experience. Customer-facing employees are expected to demonstrate emotional regulation, empathy and cognitive flexibility throughout the day. They need to manage their own emotional response while responding appropriately to customers who may themselves be frustrated or anxious.
Those capabilities depend on psychological resources. An employee already using considerable cognitive and emotional capacity to manage uncertainty about their employment has less capacity available for the emotional labour required by a difficult customer interaction. Maintaining the same level of performance may therefore require considerably more effort.
The effects of prolonged uncertainty are not limited to how people think about their work. Sustained activation of the body's stress response can contribute to fatigue, disrupted sleep, elevated blood pressure, headaches and increased susceptibility to illness. Occasional periods of stress are generally manageable, particularly when people have opportunities to recover. The difficulty arises when the perceived threat persists and there is no clear opportunity to return to a sense of safety.
For some employees, this can contribute to burnout, characterised by emotional exhaustion, cynicism and a reduced sense of professional efficacy. The combination of increased workload, reduced resources and continuing uncertainty can create conditions in which burnout becomes more likely.
There is also increasing discussion of workplace experiences in terms of trauma, although some caution is needed. Feeling anxious after watching colleagues lose their jobs is not, in itself, evidence of psychological disorder. It is an understandable response to a significant threat to security and stability. However, some individuals may experience symptoms that resemble trauma responses, particularly where redundancy has involved prolonged uncertainty, perceived injustice or repeated cycles of organisational threat.
The useful question for organisations is therefore not whether every difficult reaction should be labelled as trauma, but whether employees have the conditions and resources necessary to recover.
Some psychological harm is probably unavoidable. Redundancies represent genuine loss, and no amount of careful communication can remove that reality. Attempts to put a positive spin on an objectively difficult situation can undermine trust further.
What organisations can influence is whether employees experience the process as fair, respectful and understandable.
Research into procedural justice is particularly relevant here. Employees are generally more accepting of difficult outcomes when they believe decisions were made consistently, communicated honestly and implemented respectfully. They may still dislike the outcome, but they are more likely to perceive the process as legitimate.
This also explains why reassurance can sometimes be counterproductive. If employees are repeatedly told that their jobs are safe, only to experience another round of redundancies a few months later, the organisation has weakened the credibility of future reassurance.
Where uncertainty exists, it can be more psychologically honest to acknowledge it. Leaders cannot always promise that there will never be another restructure, but they can explain what is known, what is not known, how decisions are being made and when employees can expect further information.
Uncertainty cannot always be eliminated, but it can be managed.
Leaders understandably focus on supporting those who leave. People losing their jobs need practical and emotional support, and organisations have a responsibility to treat departing employees with dignity. However, those who remain also need an opportunity to process what has happened.
That might involve space to ask difficult questions, acknowledgement of the loss of colleagues, explanation of the rationale behind decisions and recognition that trust may need to be rebuilt rather than simply assumed.
The period immediately following redundancies is also not necessarily the ideal time to celebrate productivity gains from having fewer employees or launch ambitious transformation programmes. Remaining employees may be operating with reduced emotional capacity while learning new responsibilities. If the organisation immediately expects more from fewer people, a short-term cost reduction can become a longer-term problem involving burnout, disengagement, absence and employee turnover.
This is particularly relevant in contact centres, where operational metrics can create an illusion of recovery. Service levels may return to target, average handling time may stabilise and customer satisfaction may initially remain unchanged. None of those measures necessarily tells us whether employees have psychologically recovered.
Leaders should therefore resist equating silence with resilience. An advisor can sound professional to a customer while privately feeling anxious about their employment. A team can hit its service-level target while trust in leadership is declining. A manager can report that morale is "fine" because nobody has complained, when employees have simply decided that speaking up is unlikely to change anything.
The answer is not to avoid difficult organisational decisions. Businesses sometimes have to restructure, reduce costs or change their operating model. Nor is the answer to create a workplace in which employees are protected from every form of uncertainty. That would be neither realistic nor particularly useful.
The responsibility is to recognise that organisational change has both an operational and a psychological dimension.
After redundancies, employees need to understand what has happened, why decisions were made and what happens next. They need opportunities to ask questions and challenge assumptions. They need realistic information rather than false reassurance, and they need leaders to recognise that trust is something that may have to be rebuilt.
Most importantly, they need sufficient resources to do the work they are now being asked to do.
An organisation cannot remove half of a team and assume that the remaining employees will simply absorb the workload indefinitely without consequences. Nor can it expect people to deliver consistently excellent customer experiences while simultaneously dealing with prolonged uncertainty about their own future.
The businesses that recover most successfully are therefore unlikely to be those that simply return their operational measures to normal as quickly as possible. They are more likely to be those that recognise that psychological recovery is part of organisational recovery.
Redundancy changes more than the organisation chart. It can reshape people's sense of security, belonging and trust.
The challenge for leaders is to recognise that the employees who remain are not necessarily returning to the organisation they worked for before. They have seen colleagues leave, experienced uncertainty, inherited responsibilities and potentially questioned whether the psychological contract they thought existed is still intact.
That does not make leaders fragile, but it does make their response understandable.
The redundancy programme may be complete from an organisational perspective, but for the people who remain, the more difficult work may only just be beginning: rebuilding the confidence that they can once again do good work without constantly wondering whether they will be there to do it tomorrow.
Keywords: Culture, Leadership
Layoff Survivor Syndrome: The Hidden Cost of Job Cuts to Employee Experience
Self-Awareness: The Meta-Skill of the Future Leader
Compute in Orbit, Care at the Bedside
Friday’s Change Reflection Quote – Saeculum Leadership – Leaders Build Change That Outlasts Them 
The Corix Partners Friday Reading List - September 18, 2026
