TeamLayoffs #WorkplaceSurvivorship #EmotionAtWork
Understanding the Impact of a Team Layoff
It finally happened to you… 80% of your team was laid off today. This unexpected, shocking event can leave you grappling with numerous emotions, questions, and uncertainties. You’re not alone in this experience, and it’s important to understand both the personal and professional implications of such a significant change.
Initial Shock and Survivorship Bias
One of the first feelings you’re experiencing is likely shock. It’s natural to feel a form of survivorship bias, wondering why you were chosen to stay while others were let go. Survivorship bias can create a sense of guilt, making you question your worth and contribution to the team.
- 🎯 Survivorship Bias: When individuals focus on the survivors of a particular event and overlook those who did not survive, possibly leading to misguided conclusions.
You’re part of a close-knit group of ten, and seeing eight coworkers, including your direct boss, laid off without notice is jarring. There were no goodbyes or last moments, just swift, impersonal exits.
The Human Factor and Personal Circumstances
You empathize deeply with your colleagues’ personal situations:
- 🍼 Your boss has two young children.
- 🏡 One coworker recently bought a house and moved for this job.
- 💍 Another just got married.
- 🌡️ One colleague is taking care of a sick family member.
These personal stakes make the layoffs even more heart-wrenching.
Reflecting on Your Situation
Comparing your circumstances to those of your colleagues can amplify feelings of guilt. As a single person with fewer personal responsibilities, you wonder why you were chosen to stay despite your own perception of underperformance:
- 🕐 Regularly take extensive lunch breaks.
- 🏢 Often show up late and don’t adhere to office attendance requirements.
Navigating Stress and Pressure
The sudden change has brought unprecedented stress levels at work. Being one of the few retained employees can create a sense of owing something to the company. Yet, the pressure and possibly the working environment might make you contemplate leaving the job, adding to your emotional turmoil.
How to Cope and Move Forward
The situation is challenging, but there are steps you can take to cope and move forward:
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Acknowledge Your Feelings: It’s okay to feel conflicted. Acknowledge your emotions; this is the first step towards managing them.
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Seek Support: Talk to friends, family, or a therapist. Sharing your experience can help you process it.
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Reach Out to Laid-Off Colleagues: If appropriate, connect with them personally. Express your support and see if you can offer assistance.
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Evaluate Your Role: Reflect on your job performance. Use this opportunity to reassess and possibly improve your work ethic and engagement.
- Plan Your Next Steps: Whether you plan to stay or leave, consider your long-term career goals. Update your resume, network, and explore new opportunities if needed.
Final Thoughts
Experiencing a significant layoff within your team is emotionally and professionally difficult. Understanding and addressing your feelings of guilt and survivorship bias are essential steps in navigating this new landscape. By actively coping and planning your next steps, you can better manage the current stress and prepare for future opportunities.
Remember, you’re not alone in this. Reach out, reflect, and take proactive steps to move forward. 💪✨
I’m intrigued, what do they expect to happen to your workload when 4/5 gets laid off?
They probably kept you bc perhaps your boss (and others?) was making more money? I know how you feel, but you can’t feel guilty. I’d start looking for a new job immediately though. 8/10 is not auspicious.
Did they even try to justify this?
Okay, here’s some real talk for you…
>I can’t even begin to imagine what they are going through on a personal level:
>
>My boss just had two kids
>
>One of my coworkers recently bought a HOUSE and MOVED for this job
>
>Another just got married
>
>One has a sick family member
None of that shit matters right now.
>I slack off, do the bare minimum, always take an hour+ for lunch, show up 1/2 days in the office when I feel like it (3 days min required), and I never show up on time.
This, right here? It’s more than likely gone. Without those other 8 people, your slacking is going to be noticed real fast. So start getting your shit together. Start looking for a new place to work, or be ready to have 5 times the normal workload.
To put this another way, you were all in a trench and a mortar landed killing those 8. You don’t have the luxury to give a shit about their deaths now, though. You are still in a trench that is being fired upon. Deal with the situation at hand now and deal with what happened to them later.
Their time is over and you’re not going to be thinking of them three years from now. You’re about to get BUSY.
> I slack off, do the bare minimum, always take an hour+ for lunch, show up 1/2 days in the office when I feel like it (3 days min required), and I never show up on time.
Sounds like you are the main character in Office Space.
This happened to one of the teams at my company. The remaining two people immediately quit.
Yeah, been there. They’re hoping to keep just enough legacy knowledge around to not die on the vine while they shift your work to cheaper and less experienced people. If it’s within your budget, ask for a retention bonus to guarantee you’ll stick around and if not, put in a two week notice because that axe is gonna make a backswing.
ask for a pay raise to stay. You should expect a massive spike in workload and stress.
I made it through the first three rounds of layoffs, I got it on the fourth. I hope you’re looking for another position.
Start polishing that resume. You survived this round, you might not survive the next one
What type of work/industry was this?
Survivor’s Guilt
Refuse additional work and force them to fire you. You’ll be able to easily apply for unemployment with that level of layoff happening.
Your current work was clearly good enough to survive a 4/5 chance of culling. They wouldn’t be able to cite performance as a valid reason.
Look for a job, do your role (and no further) and make the best of it. Usually an 80% drop is destroying the entire project and just folding the role and resources in with others. This is when you define how much they can exploit you in the future. Don’t stress, be reasonable, and see what happens.
You being single may have been the deciding factor. Knew a couple software guys that got laid off once they started getting laid and thinking about settling down. Suddenly their weekends mattered and they didn’t feel like coding 7 days a week and were let go.
Well that’s just a straight shooter with upper management written all over him, Bob.
You’re going to get an increased workload, and fast. Your days of slacking are over because either you pick up the work or you’re going to get fired for performance.
I’d be polishing my resume and looking to get a new job quickly. If they take out 80% of a team, they either plan to finish the rest off soon, put several people’s worth of work on the remaining two, or plan to transition you to different roles within the company. But you want to be looking for that new job now, because it is easier to get a new job while you’re still employed. The dreaded “resume gap” is avoided in that case.
OP you need to get someone to talk to. Survivor syndrome is a real thing and causes many, many issues post restructure.
It’s not just how you feel about loosing your team (real grief) but also about what happens when theyvexoect you to pick up the work if 4 other people, worse when your remaining team mate decides to leave.
Take care.
Simply put, your cost to productivity ratio is more appealing to retain over the others. It’s only numbers. You may slack off, but maybe you complete a similar or greater volume of measurable tasks in a given time.
Consider Healthcare. A person with a family who takes full advantage of health benefits costs the company a greater amount of money. Premiums have risen and continue to rise every year. Leadership cannot out and fire someone for having a family. Or at least, that cannot be the stated logic.
I’m sorry that this is cold, but we must look at this as a battle and the enemy must be understood before they can be acted against.
Do we work at the same place? Literally, the same thing happened today. 8 people just gone. I’m sitting there as the new guy like wtf just happened? Blink twice if the company starts with a “C”
More evidence that you should only be as loyal to your employer as they are to you – no further out than your next paycheck.
Interesting. They cut people who were on family insurance plans(?)
Give your colleagues some time to process, and offer some help if you can – letters of reference, LinkedIn endorsements, network connections, etc. I was laid off with most of my department as well and it’s absolutely terrible, but I sure as shit remember the people who actually cared and tried to help.
Not worth dwelling on the why, as it could be a slew of things.
I would be more concerned with the workload falling on just the two of you now. Probably not a bad idea to update the ole resume.
The last great layoff of 2018 at our place they chopped half the staff (15 of 30 people) and it ranged from two guys that had been there less than a year, to two people that had been there 25 and 28 years, respectfully.
Even after our main manager and HR finished walking the first 14 out, the manager pulled a short meeting together to tell us how there was no way to prevent it as we had been hemorrhaging money with our manpower versus workload but to not think to hard on it as the layoffs were finished. He went to lunch to go check on his pregnant wife and the contract work being done. Not even 5 minutes later the BIG boss and head of HR came down looking for him, called him back to the office and let him go.
While I can admit the manpower was pretty inflated at the time, I do not agree with the folks that were let go and it was pretty obvious our management had little say in it because the office secretary with 28 years handled not only our clerical but three other large teams clerical (purchase orders, timesheets, shipment logs, etc). Still haven’t fully recovered from that and shit still falls through the cracks to this day.
I got bad news for you, bud, the layoffs may not be quite done yet. I hope you **don’t** get fired before you’ve got something else lined up, but you may want to get your resume ready.
Something has to give. This isn’t right.
They don’t care about the people doing the work.
Don’t feel guilty and definitely drop that feeling of owing them anything. Do not change your plans for leaving and if you do, you should make the change to leave SOONER rather than later. Heck, maybe even poach the last person on your team to leave with you.
They’re about to introduce AI to their shop
You are being kept for the exact reasons you listed the others have for being away from work.
You have no personal commitments to interrupt your work life. And since you are now the only person they are going to bury you with demands and expect you to be in the office and on call.
When they come for you, there will be less severance. That should make you feel less guilty.
You are about to be buried in the avalanche of their work that needs to be done. No more 1/2 days
Yeah, there’s some serious shit coming. 8/10? You were kept to lock the doors and turn off the lights. Bounce.
You probably get paid the least. They just need someone to wrap up the loose ends, then you’ll be gone too.
> Like why was I one of the two chosen to stay while others were let go?
This was me at my first job. Took me many years to realize the reason I wasn’t let go: They weren’t paying me shit compared to everyone else. It was my first job, hired as front line tech support and while I got lots more responsibility over the years it never came with much of a pay raise.
And yeah, you need to leave. Don’t feel guilty about it – this is a canary in the coal mine situation, except it’s more like a gas explosion wiping out half the miners. This thing (maybe just your team, maybe the whole company) is collapsing so don’t feel guilty for gobbling up the scraps and asking your recently-departed coworkers who’s hiring as they find other jobs. Unless of course you think you and the one other person can match the output of 10 people and it was just a cost saving measure.
Well, I generally come in at least fifteen minutes late, ah, I use the side door – that way Lumbergh can’t see me, and, uh, after that I just sorta space out for about an hour. …I’d say in a given week I probably only do about fifteen minutes of real, actual, work.
Same thing happened to me last Friday. Was in the middle of a work call when my boss’s boss called me randomly on teams. Saw the Hr lead in the call and knew it was a bad sign. I’m the middle of them telling me I was laid off they were already signing me out of all my apps and locking down my computer. I was in a 10 person layoff.
If I was using a term wrong that incorrectly I would want to know. So feel free to downvote me, but Op, that’s not what survivorship bias is. You’re thinking survivor’s guilt, probably. Survivorship bias is putting metal plates on your WW2 airplanes that returned to base where the bullet holes are. But that’s not what you should do. Instead retrieve fallen planes and put reinforcements where the bullet holes are in those planes, leading to actual benefits. I’m also a little high right now and this seems super important to me for some reason. Anyway, not trying to “umm asckshually” you, but like I said, if I had that same mix up I would want to know. (And I Ctrl+Fd and no one has said anything as far as I can tell) Xox, now I’m wondering if I shouldn’t have told you that I’m high, because it’s probably really fucking obvious. Whoops.
They’ll probably ask you to train a fellow lay off survivor to “help out” your short handed team…That’s the sign you’re next.
Either refuse, or “train” them to do everything wrong. Then once you’re laid off, it all goes to hell.
Keep in touch with someone so they can give you updates on the shitstorm. That will give you peace. Then go and crack a beer. 🍺
You’re single. No family. You can work really long hours to pick up all of the slack.
That is, until you flip a desk over and storm out. With a job offer from someplace else in hand.
I had a bootlicking relative who always bragged when his teams got laid off. Proudly worked extra hours, then pushed the work on to new hires who had no idea what they were doing a couple weeks later (after the quarterly reports were published and the stock owners saw “profits increasing” due to layoffs). And all the corners he and his fellow scabs cut? Who knows how many people they’ve gotten killed with their shoddy work.
Survivor’s Guilt, not bias. Survivorship bias is like reinforcing fighter jet wings that have holes in them, rather than where they aren’t.
You were probably kept because you didn’t need dependent benefits.
You’re feeling survivor’s guilt, for being someone who didn’t get laid off, not survivorship bias, which’d be you saying “it’s easy not to get laid off”: accurate for you (in this case), but definitely not the reality when 80% were let go.
Nothing to do with performance or behavior. Usually big lay off are done with only cost consideration. You are just a line in a spreadsheet and they have a number as an objective. You are probably still there because you did not cost that much.