I Survived Five Redundancies. Here’s What Leaders Always Get Wrong About the People Who Stay

Redundancies aren’t just operational events, they are emotional earthquakes that reshape culture, trust, and the psychological contract. Yet this side of restructuring is still widely misunderstood.

The impact reaches far beyond headcount cuts, it affects psychological safety, organisational trust, culture erosion, and employee engagement long after the restructuring ends.

I’ve been through five restructures and redundancies, and experienced first-hand the early signs of survivor syndrome - the quiet fear, the uncertainty, the withdrawal. This is my honest story, what it really feels like and what HR leaders and senior managers need to understand need to understand about the human side of change.

The Emotional Impact No One Discusses

There’s a side of redundancy that rarely gets talked about. Not from the people who leave but from those who stay behind. After surviving five restructures, I can tell you: the impact doesn’t stop with the redundancy list.

I’ve sat in meetings where colleagues found out their roles no longer existed. I’ve seen empty desks appear overnight. I’ve heard leadership say, “We’ll come out stronger,” while we all quietly wondered if we were next… or when. The emotional toll doesn’t hit you all at once. It’s a slow build: anxiety, guilt, fatigue. Every restructure chips away at trust until you start to question everything, your job, your value, even your sense of belonging and whether the company culture is just another tick box activity.

What I experienced first-hand mirrors the patterns we now see in employee experience data across organisations: trust fractures, psychological safety drops, and survivors disengage long before metrics catch up.

The Predictable Cycle of Fear

What made it harder wasn’t just the announcements... it was the predictability. After the second year, we all knew when the next round would hit. It would almost always land in November, just before Christmas. The pattern didn’t soften the blow; it amplified it. You’d come into work each day with a quiet, tightening fear: Is today the day?

That kind of uncertainty changes people. It certainly changed me.

There was a constant internal debate: do you stay loyal and hope for the best, or do you jump before you’re pushed? When resignations began to ripple through the team, it wasn’t because people no longer cared. It was because they no longer felt safe. When the psychological contract breaks, people stop investing in a future they no longer believe they’ll be part of.

How Trust Erodes Round After Round

By the third restructure, trust had all but evaporated. It felt less like we were valued contributors and more like potential cost reductions waiting to happen. The phrase, “It’s not personal, it’s business,” became a familiar refrain, but it never landed the way leaders hoped it would. When you watch colleagues with decades of service receive a redundancy notice, it feels deeply personal, no matter how it’s packaged.

Looking back with distance, I can appreciate that some restructuring decisions are unavoidable. Businesses evolve, and sometimes roles genuinely do need to change. But at the time, none of that logic mattered. The feelings were raw, immediate, and deeply human: anxiety, hypervigilance, and the sense that no amount of hard work could guarantee stability.

Leaders often underestimate this emotional fallout. Change fatigue doesn’t appear overnight. It builds slowly and quietly, reshaping employee behaviour long before performance metrics catch up. People become guarded. Discretionary effort drops. The focus shifts from progression to protection.

What I experienced is well documented in research on the psychological contract: once trust is broken, discretionary effort declines long before performance data shows the change.

This is the unspoken reality for employees left behind after redundancies: they’re carrying an emotional load that never appears in a restructure plan but profoundly influences engagement, culture, and retention. CIPD reports that only 29% of employees feel change is managed well in their organisation, meaning most workplaces are inadvertently creating the very anxieties and disengagement they later struggle to fix.

The first time, you feel lucky. By the third, you feel exposed. By the fifth, you start emotionally detaching, not because you want to, but because you no longer feel any security or loyalty. I wasn’t disengaged out of defiance. I was exhausted.

Here’s what I’ve learned that I wish more leadership teams understood: redundancies don’t just impact the people who leave. They silently reshape the mindset of the people who stay. The survivors.

The Hard Truths About Redundancies Leadership Needs to Hear

• Trust will fracture, and when it goes, performance follows.
  Restructures signal that security is conditional, no matter how loyal or high-performing someone is. Once that belief sets in, discretionary effort drops long before leaders see the impact. Gallup finds that 70% of engagement variance is driven by leadership behaviours¹, making how leaders communicate during restructures more influential than the restructure itself. Discover more about the true impact of line managers on engagement in our free guide.
• Culture is the first casualty.
  Values like people-first or we’re a family lose credibility when actions contradict the message. Employees watch what leaders do, not what they say. CIPD research shows that repeated redundancy rounds lead to higher cynicism, emotional exhaustion, and job detachment among the people who remain ².
• Job insecurity fuels churn.
  When people no longer feel safe, they begin planning exits long before they resign. A European workforce study found that 1 in 10 employees believe they could be laid off imminently, a level of job insecurity strongly associated with an increased intention to leave³. Survivor-syndrome research also shows retained employees experience anxiety and lowered organisational commitment⁴ following layoffs.
• An ‘us vs them’ divide emerges quickly.
  If the only time senior leaders appear is to deliver difficult news, employees stop seeing them as part of the team. post-restructure studies from the IES highlight a breakdown in trust, reduced psychological safety, and a sense of leadership distance; classic markers of the “survivor syndrome” divide⁵ that forms after layoffs.
• Disengaged employees become harder and costlier to manage.
  After redundancies, surviving employees commonly experience reduced commitment, higher emotional exhaustion, and lower engagement, all of which increase management workload and slow performance recovery. Downsizing research consistently shows that the intended financial gains are often offset by the hidden cost of disengagement⁶. Emotions are a significant driver of employee engagement, which you can read more about in our Whitepaper: Why Emotions Matter in Employee Engagement.

When restructures happen, companies often focus on business continuity. They put plans in place to manage workloads, realign teams, and keep the lights on. But there’s an invisible cost that doesn’t show up on a spreadsheet: trust erosion.

The Hidden Burdens You Don't See

Employees who survive redundancies often carry hidden burdens:

• Survivor’s guilt: discomfort and self-questioning about staying when others didn’t.
• Hypervigilance and constant anxiety: always anticipating the next round.
• Emotional fatigue: the mental drain of working in self-protection mode.
• Quiet quitting: disengaging and doing only what’s required to cope.

And yet, after each restructure, there’s this unspoken expectation to “carry on as usual.”

But the reality is, things aren’t usual. Productivity, engagement, and culture all take hits in ways that aren’t always obvious at first glance.

What Leaders Can Do: A Practical Framework for Rebuilding Trust After Redundancies

Leaders often assume that once the restructure is complete, the organisation can simply “move forward.” But trust doesn’t recover by itself, it has to be intentionally rebuilt. A simple three-step model helps leaders do this in a structured, meaningful way.

LISTEN: Understand the emotional impact before driving performance

Practical actions:

• Hold a post-restructure listening cycle within 30 days, through small-group sessions, skip-levels, or facilitated conversations.
• Use short pulse surveys to detect early signs of change fatigue or trust erosion.
• Create safe, confidential channels for people to express what they’re worried about.
• Equip managers with check-in templates so they know how to ask the right questions.

REBUILD: Restore clarity, transparency, and psychological safety

Practical actions:

• Send monthly “State of the Business” updates to keep transparency consistent.
• Train managers in change communication and psychological safety so they can confidently support their teams.
• Reconfirm organisational priorities: what has changed, what hasn’t, and why.
• Rebalance workloads to avoid burnout among surviving teams.
• Refresh development plans and progression conversations to reconnect people with growth.

SUSTAIN: Embed trust and stability through ongoing leadership behaviour

Practical actions:

• Maintain transparent communication rhythms: monthly updates, quarterly reviews.
• Check psychological safety regularly using pulse data and qualitative feedback.
• Recognise and celebrate small wins to rebuild shared confidence.
• Make wellbeing and workload checks part of routine management, not reactive fixes.
• Continue developing leaders in empathy, visibility, and change navigation (the capabilities that matter most after restructures).

Closing Thoughts

This isn’t a story about my experience, it’s a warning about what your people may not be telling you. If you're navigating restructuring now, your culture, trust levels, and engagement won’t recover by accident. They recover through intentional, visible leadership.

The companies that navigate restructures well are the ones who recognise that their “survivors” are also affected. They invest in restoring psychological safety before pushing for performance.

If you want practical guidance on how to support your managers through high-pressure seasons, join our live webinar on 25 November where we are joined by workplace wellbeing expert, Dilan Gomih, for a deep dive into The Great Squeeze and a live Q&A.

• 1. Gallup, State of the Global Workplace Report.
• 2. CIPD, Impact of Consecutive Redundancy Programmes.
• 3. Scandinavian Journal of Work & Organisational Psychology, workforce insecurity study.
• 4. HRM Asia / HCAMag, Survivor Syndrome insights.
• 5. Institute for Employment Studies, Effects of Redundancy on Remaining Employees.
• 6. Human Resource Management Journal (Wiley Online Library), downsizing and engagement review.