March 17, 2008. That awful date is forever burned in my memory and ended up changing the trajectory of my career forever – and what came after is when I learned about layoff survivor guilt.
A young marketer at the time, with barely 3 years of work experience, I was facing a steep learning curve at a semiconductor company. Being a seasonal business heavily invested in capital expenses (three fabrication factories in the US alone), my company went through layoff cycles at least once or twice every year. What made the 2008 layoff different was the sheer volume:
25% of the company’s workforce was cut in one swift motion. And we were all left reeling.
I wasn’t personally impacted by that layoff, but it was still traumatic. I witnessed rows upon rows of my friends pack up and leave, in what felt like minutes. These were people that I had coffee with every day, bickering on radio commentators’ grammatical mistakes, TPing colleagues’ cubicles when they were traveling. I knew their wives’ and children’s names. I had so many memories, and suddenly these people that were such a big part of my life were gone. In the blink of an eye.
15 years since that day, everything about it is still vivid in my mind. Thankfully, those impacted eventually found other roles and settled back into life, but it changed my career trajectory forever – after that day, the realization that I couldn’t stay in a bottom-line driven company anymore led to gradually shifting my focus toward software companies with fewer capital expenditures burdening their balance sheets.
It’s very easy to start wondering: Why them; why not me? Was I just lucky? Will I be lucky enough the next time?
Survivor guilt is defined as the sense of guilt associated with surviving a situation, incident, or event while others did not. In the workplace, survivor syndrome is a psychological response that can emerge after people survive downsizing or layoffs.
In addition to the guilt, a survivor’s disarray of emotions include relief that you still have a job, and the feeling of being overwhelmed from taking on more work.
When you’re a leader, there’s the additional realization that outcomes still need to be delivered, and setting boundaries doesn’t work because there’s fewer avenues for delegation left anymore.
Surviving employees can be coping with layoff survivor guilt for a long time, negatively impacting well-being and mental health among teams within the organization.
“We lock up our homes, we lock up our cars... but when it comes to boundaries for our personal well-being, we just give it away. You know: just come in, take it, and rob me.” The chief wellbeing officer is a new, much-needed role to tackle the growing challenge of professional burnout.
There are multiple ways that layoff survivor guilt can show up in the workplace:
According to Gallup, disengaged employees cost the workplace $7.8 trillion in lost productivity in a single year, an equivalent of a whopping 11% of global GDP.
In Leadership IQ’s study, Don’t Expect Layoff Survivors to Be Grateful, 74% of employees who kept their jobs during a corporate layoff say their productivity declined post-layoff.
To help employees after layoffs, there are a few things that are critical to assisting:
Emotional resilience is also key. It’s important to remember that ultimately the gratification for the work we do lies not in the salary we bring in, or the bosses or employees we strive to please every day. That gratification must lie in intrinsic purpose, one that’s larger than the company we currently work for – a purpose that cannot die even if the path to getting there must shift or undergo dramatic transformation.
So, look for those silver linings that may not be immediately apparent. For me, it took years to realize the shift that happened in my mind on March 17, 2008. It led me to become an industry expert, by working through multiple roles in different industries as I gradually moved from hardware to software. These are skills that I now use every day and help me operate at a level of competence that I could never have foreseen back in 2008.
We must learn to lean on each other and learn from each other’s experiences to make it through to the other side.
