Minimizing Survivor’s Guilt: How to Rebuild Trust After a Layoff
Survivor's Guilt is Real: Employees often deal with survivor's guilt post-RIF, making it essential for HR to address these emotional challenges to foster a supportive workplace environment.
Workloads Just Got Heavier: With layoffs, remaining employees face expanded workloads, necessitating HR's role in providing resources and support to manage stress and expectations effectively.
Communication is Key: Open and transparent communication can help alleviate concerns, allowing HR to demonstrate commitment to remaining employees and rebuild confidence in the organization.
In the wake of widespread reductions in force (RIFs) across the tech and SaaS sectors, HR leaders face a critical challenge: rebuilding trust with remaining employees who may be experiencing survivor's guilt while simultaneously taking on expanded workloads.
This psychological challenge—where employees who survived layoffs question why they were spared while colleagues weren't—can devastate productivity, engagement, and retention if not properly addressed. Given the last year in tech and SaaS, it’s not an uncommon story.
“With the situation with the economy being what it’s been, it's been very difficult to achieve sales goals,” Erika Westphal, Vice President of People Operations at WorkSpan said. “How do you communicate a reduction in force and not be left with a situation where people are bracing for the worst all the time and not trusting that their jobs will be okay? How do you make sure they aren’t walking around feeling like their jobs are in jeopardy?"
Understanding the Trust Deficit
When layoffs occur, two fundamental types of trust are broken, as Claire Lew, CEO at Canopy, explained during a People Managing People Ask the Expert session titled “Building Trust in High Stakes Settings”:
Cognitive trust: Employees' ability to rely on their leaders and believe they'll follow through on commitments.
Affective trust: The emotional connection between leaders and team members that creates psychological safety.
"We have to recognize that the thing that got broken in this situation is the cognitive trust,” Lew said. “It's the fact that I'm asking this direct report to rely on me for a responsible and respectable amount of work, and now, all of a sudden, they are just getting absolutely overloaded and now are in this more uncertain context."
Particularly problematic is the "bait and switch" scenario that can occur when recently hired employees see their roles dramatically change.
You hire someone. Within six months, a layoff occurs, and now they're asked to take on work that wasn't a part of that initial role that they're still kind of settling into. This undermines an employee’s ability to build trust, because it hadn't fully established it in the first place.
“We need our employees to help us figure out how things get done in the aftermath of layoffs,” says Amy Casciotti, Vice President of HR at TechSmith. “We have to remind them that obviously we value them, they're still here at the company. Reinforce that with them because they're going to need to hear it a lot of times after a layoff. We've all seen companies where there’s been multiple rounds of layoffs. Even if that is not the plan for the company, that's what they're used to seeing out in the news.”
Rebuilding Cognitive Trust: Actions Speak Louder Than Words
For HR leaders, rebuilding cognitive trust after layoffs requires demonstrating reliability through consistent actions rather than reassuring platitudes. Lew emphasizes this distinction:
“Cognitive trust is, in fact, the ability for people to feel like they can rely on you and that they're going to know that you can follow through,” she said. “That's a matter of showing, actually, more than telling. In other words, what can you actually deliver and follow through on?"
The first thing you need to do is give employees time to process the events that have occurred.
“Start with empathy and try to be as transparent and honest as you can be,” says Casciotti. “Understanding that not only did one of their friends and coworkers exit the organization, but your employees are now wondering, what does that mean for me? Am I going to be next? They're dealing with a lot of grief and concern themselves. Give them a chance to express that.”
Practical strategies for HR
- Practice Radical Transparency
Be honest about the current challenges and don't sugarcoat difficult realities. Afterall, their colleagues were just fired, this isn't the time for toxic positivity.
"One of the most powerful ways of following through when these times are so difficult, is merely an accurate statement of what things are right now. Saying, 'I know that this is a really challenging and tough and quite frankly a bit of unrealistic time in terms of how much work is placed on you,'" suggests Lew. - Create and Communicate Clear Pathways
Develop concrete plans for how workloads will be adjusted and communicate them consistently.
"Actually trying to share a path of what you are doing as a leader to offload some of that. Again, this is also part of cognitive trust," Lew advises. - Implement Regular Check-ins
Establish consistent one-on-one meetings focused on resource allocation and support.
"Is it the weekly one-on-one meetings where you're giving them status updates?" poses Lew as one potential trust-building mechanism. - Advocate for Realistic Workloads
HR must be willing to push back against unsustainable expectations.
"You can take two other stakeholders in your organization and say, 'this is completely unrealistic. Right. And something has to change,'" Lew recommends. - Restructure Work Assignments Where Possible
Sometimes immediate relief is needed before larger organizational changes can occur.
"You can kind of take matters into your own hands and depending on the size of the organization and the culture in your organization and actually rearrange the amount of work that that person has to do," notes Lew.
Recognizing Warning Signs
There are signs that trust rebuilding efforts aren't succeeding. While social withdrawal might seem like an obvious red flag, Lew cautions against overinterpreting changes in social engagement:
"Some leaders are quick to react to a person who becomes really withdrawn all of a sudden, or they were really interactive in Slack, and now they're not. And I would say that with, again, the tens of thousands of leaders that we've worked with and situations that we've seen, someone's social engagement may or may not be an indication of or correlated with their work performance," she said
Instead, focus on measurable performance indicators:
"Focus on the work performance. What is actually the work output that you're looking to... be the expectation for a job well done, and that's going to be your sign," said Lew.
The Path Forward
Rebuilding trust after layoffs is neither quick nor easy, but it's essential for organizational recovery. By focusing first on rebuilding cognitive trust—delivering on promises and creating realistic work expectations—HR leaders can establish the foundation needed to later rebuild the emotional connections that drive engagement and retention.
They can also create the trust necessary to move forward and help people fill gaps that exist for the business after a layoff or chart a new course forward.
“You have to help them to understand the immediate needs for the company, getting these skills in place, how that paves a path for them to get where they want to go or to create time for them to spend learning the things that they want to learn,” Casciotti said. “I think a lot of times, we'll just tell an employee that this task needs to get done, I need you to learn how to do it."
She highlights the need for helping employees figure out what to take off their plate first before they can take on new tasks or roles.
"We have to make sure we're having that full conversation and not just asking them to go take on more work or a training without any context around what it means for them, how it impacts them," she said.
The key is patience. Like Casciotti said at the start, people are going to need to hear it a lot that they’re part of your plans. As the world around them continues to feel more chaotic and that running tab of layoffs being tracked by TechCrunch gets bigger, being able to experience trust is going to become more difficult and therefore, more valuable.
What's Next?
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