Left behind: Breaking the silence around survivor guilt in the wake of mass layoffs

“What did we do wrong?”

The question haunts Mohit* every day. As an HR leader in a small organization, Mohit was recently asked to oversee layoffs impacting 10% of the workforce. Among those let go were a group of freshers barely six months into the first jobs of their lives, secured after a grueling selection process.

“‘They kept asking me, ‘What did we do wrong?’” Mohit remembers. “I had no answer.”

Then there was the employee who was fired after spending over 15 years in the company. “I had dragged him from another city [to comply with] our company’s return-to-office mandate. His wife was now jobless. His children were just settling in their schools. He asked me on his way out, ‘At least you could have let me be in my hometown, how do I face my neighbors now?’” Again, Mohit had no answer.

“Being in HR, I see layoffs coming at least a quarter in advance,” he says. “But I am bound by confidentiality and cannot warn the employees about it. Then as the layoffs start, it’s like a clock being turned backwards as it almost always ends with my own job hanging by a thread. The weight of handling all the exits leaves me drained and without the courage to move on.”

Mohit’s overwhelm has a name: survivor guilt, the feeling that you unfairly escaped harm while others could not. The term was coined in 1943 by neurologist Stanley Cobb and psychiatrist Erich Lindemann, who described it as the presence of tension, loneliness, or mental pain among survivors of a tragedy.

In the workplace, traumatic episodes like mass layoffs are increasingly common. Workers who get to keep their jobs often silently struggle with the burden of survivor guilt. How is this affecting the way we work, and how can we better support each other through these crises?

The last one standing

Initially applied to those who survived the Holocaust, Hiroshima, and the AIDS epidemic, survivor guilt is also associated with those who lived through mass shootings and suicides of loved ones. It’s a complex and sometimes conflicted mental state marked by the irrational belief that you are somehow responsible for others’ suffering or did not do enough to help them, alongside fears over your own safety—culminating in a fixation with the question: “why them and not me?”

While it’s not categorized as a mental disorder, survivor guilt can be a serious and debilitating condition. In clinical literature, it is seen as a symptom of post-traumatic stress disorder and a risk factor for depression. In extreme cases, it could even contribute to suicidal behavior.

Survivor guilt in the aftermath of mass layoffs has largely remained in the shadows despite its potentially harrowing scale, especially in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. The tech sector alone accounted for nearly a third of the estimated 700,000 people who were fired between 2022 and 2023 by US employers, with companies like Google, Meta, and Microsoft laying off 6-13% of their workforce in 2023. There were brutal stories of people fired over email or Zoom calls, or being escorted out of office buildings by security with no advance warning. The carnage has continued this year, putting severe stress on not only those suddenly forced out of employment but also those who are left behind to pick up the pieces.

But while those who lose their jobs often receive the practical and emotional succor they deserve, the plight of those who remain is largely forgotten. Layoff survivors are wary of speaking up publicly because of fear of reprisals from employers. But the survivors who agreed to speak to me for this piece repeatedly flagged a few disturbing organizational failures: broken or non-existent communication from the management; a cruel disregard for human relationships; and the perverse pressure on survivors to support their laid-off colleagues while taking care of their own emotional needs, even as they feel that their employers have abandoned them.

A silent crisis

Why are layoff survivors so often neglected? Andreas Werr and Wiley Wakeman of the Stockholm School of Economics blame it on the common wisdom that those who manage to keep their jobs should be happy and grateful. Because they are among “the lucky ones,” managers might believe that they will work even harder to justify the organization’s faith in them. “While these are reasonable assumptions, they unfortunately disregard what research tells us about the unexpected consequences of surviving downsizing.”

Joel Brockner, a Columbia Business School professor, has studied the reactions of layoff survivors for almost 40 years. His research found that survivors consistently developed a cocktail of negative emotions—anger, depression, fear, distrust, and guilt—after watching their colleagues lose their jobs. The result was reduced productivity and creativity, increased absenteeism, and a heightened risk of people quitting voluntarily.

A study in the Canadian health sector comparing the reactions of layoff survivors with those who found new jobs after being laid off showed that the latter were in fact better off on most parameters. It was the survivors who experienced higher levels of stress, less autonomy and job control, lower job satisfaction, lower physical health, and lower quality of life.

“Those entering a new job following downsizing seemed to be the real winners, whereas the survivors…ironically were the victims,” write Werr and Wakeman.

Survivor guilt and layoff anxiety don’t affect every employee equally. HR expert Kenyetta Nesbitt points out that they could be more taxing for people from marginalized identities, such as single parents or guardians and employees who are the primary source of income in their household. “The work environment changes almost immediately, and in many cases, not for the better. Not only have these cuts chipped away at the mental health of people in the workforce, but they may also be changing employees’ behavior—even stunting their career development and relationships to work overall,” she says.

Communication collapse

Organizations are frequently terrible at responding to emotions like loss and grief with dignity in the workplace. Perhaps predictably, employees find callous communication from employers to be a major source of stress during mass layoffs.

Two main drivers of layoffs are drops in business performance and changes in management. No matter the reason, says Mohit, the language used to announce layoffs tends to be cold and mechanical: “It’s not your fault,” “This decision is tough for us,” or “We take full responsibility.”

Sometimes the management is afraid that revealing poor business health will incite panic, so the layoffs could be couched as a “performance exercise.” Bosses could pick on minor work issues and blow it up to a fireable problem, hand out dry promotions (promotion with no salary hike), suddenly downgrade one’s responsibilities without any reason, or simply claim that a team has become redundant.

Grace,* who survived layoffs at a large media outfit earlier this year, was initially told by her reporting manager that she would be asked to leave in a few days, and that she should start looking for another job. “I was confused and angry,” she says. “However, my name was eventually removed from the list of people being let go.” No higher-up offered her an explanation or apology for putting her through this emotional roller coaster. “I feel horrible and keep wondering who lost their job so I could keep mine,” Grace says. “The guilt extends even to those colleagues that I didn’t know very well personally. I wonder if they would be able to quickly find another job and support their families.”

She also feels vicariously guilty that the top bosses showed no respect for how hard many of those asked to leave had worked for the company. “The entire process was so demeaning; it must have shattered everyone’s confidence because it certainly did for me. The guilt worsened when I felt sad about being left behind in the organization. I know this might seem like a privileged problem, but the feeling of helplessness and being trapped has not gone away.”

Grace was close to a senior colleague who chose to quit voluntarily to save others’ jobs, knowing that they had more financial responsibilities. “This person was noble, kind-hearted, and thoughtful. I felt selfish, unable to put others’ needs above my own—which only heightened my sense of guilt.”

Abandoned and lonely

In the absence of institutional support, individual employees often end up having to fend for themselves and their colleagues. Grace tried to listen patiently to her impacted colleagues, some of whom even judged her for not being fired. “Whatever helped people process their thoughts, I let them do it—I didn’t stand in their way or make them feel bad about it. I helped my juniors update their resumes and circulated them within my network.” Even as she works through her own feelings in therapy, Grace says, “it feels awful to keep watching your back because you never know when it might happen again.”

For Mohit, layoffs bring an additional layer of stress. “As an HR manager, I hire the employees and welcome them into the organization,” he says. “I am the first person they meet when they join the company. They trust me enough to share big life events with me. And [after all that], I am the one who comes to them and tells them ‘today is your last day.’ They feel a sense of betrayal when this happens, so nobody approaches me again even to vent.”

While he has grown used to the emotional toll of administering layoffs, for many in his profession it can be a traumatic experience. One of Mohit’s earlier employers offered access to an online counselor, but that’s proved to be an exception rather than the norm. “A combination of journaling, going on long walks with my partner, venting with HR colleagues from other companies, and seeking professional support helps me continue with my day-to-day work. I try to convince myself that there are employees here who still need me at my best.”

Where survivor guilt ends, compassion fatigue begins. “Over time, the feeling of guilt fades away,” Mohit says. “Or maybe I am still living with it, just too busy surviving to care. Sometimes I think the empathy that makes me effective as an HR person has crumbled away in the face of these circumstances.”

How to heal the harm caused by layoffs

A few years ago, my former employer ran into rough weather and decided to disband our team. It came as a shock to us since there were no augurs that things were that bad. We were angry, confused, resentful, and sad. A few of our colleagues who remained in the company told us that they were equally shocked and angry. A few months down the line, the CEO reached out to us offering to host a listening circle where we could vent our feelings. They hired a professional moderator to make sure it’d be a safe space where we could speak without judgment. While the hurt of losing a job I loved hasn’t completely gone away, and some might find such exercises tokenistic, I appreciated the effort the company took to acknowledge our feelings. Those who got to keep their jobs also got a measure of clarity and closure.

Werr and Wakeman outline three critical initiatives that leaders can implement to create a safer space for workers in the wake of mass layoffs:

1. Establish trust

• Be open and honest about the need for operational and strategic changes.
• Involve employees in problem solving so that they can see a future beyond downsizing, where the current crisis may have contributed to something positive.
• Create psychological safety, where employees feel they have a say over what is going on.
• Proactively engage with those who feel reluctant to trust the process to avoid distrust from cascading.

2. Establish a fair and respectful process

When individuals are faced with bad outcomes, they look to make sure that the procedures were fairly applied and that they were treated well during the process. Creating a fair and respectful layoff process could help alleviate the guilt survivors feel and also calm their anxieties over how they might be treated were they to be next in line.

3. Support survivors

Don’t pretend as if it’s business as usual. Create opportunities for employees to discuss the challenges created by colleagues being laid off and how to mitigate them. Train survivors to help them better cope with widened or changed work roles. Even simply acknowledging the crisis could go a long way in soothing nerves and rebuilding trust.

If you need help, this website has information on mental health professionals across the world.

*Names have been changed to protect identities.

Photo by Thomas Decamps for Welcome to the Jungle

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