How Layoffs Affect Views on the Employee-Employer Relationship

Between your LinkedIn feed, the news, and perhaps your current/former employer...the topic of layoffs seem impossible to get away from.

I'm not going to belabor you with a laundry list of stats about which companies are doing layoffs, LinkedIn seems to do a great job of that.

However, I will leave you with some insight into how layoffs seem to be affecting employee outlook towards work.

A week ago, I published a survey asking people how layoffs were impacting their views around the employee-employer relationship. The survey was shared on LinkedIn, and open to anyone.

In as little words as practical, below is some context and summary of results.

Context

• The survey ran for 1 week, and was intended to understand how layoffs in 2022 and 2023, are impacting the way that employees view employers.
• There were 22 respondents, of which 15 were laid off between 2020 and 2023. The remaining 7 respondents were not laid off between 2020 and 2023, and it is unknown if they have ever been laid off.

Summary of Results

Layoffs affect the laid off, and the still employed.

In other words, layoffs do seem to change employee sentiment, even for those who are not laid off.

For those who remain employed, below were some common themes taken from their responses around their views towards employers:

• Even if an employee is under the impression that their performance is stellar, they now feel like there is no job security.
• Employed respondents are generally feeling dis-empowered and supported, as illustrated in the response below.

They laid off 2/3 of my team without any notice until the day of the layoffs. Plus we were reorged into an unrelated team with no knowledge of our discipline. I feel completely taken for granted and unsupported. Plus my workload has quadrupled. I feel like all I'm expected to pick up this extra work and somehow make it all happen. So even though I didn't get laid off, I feel undervalued and unappreciated.

For those laid off, sentiment seems to be more intimate in nature

In viewing how being laid off affects peoples' views about their previous employers, responses seem more akin to a dissolution of an intimate relationship. Trust and loyalty were common topics, as shown below.

• Distrust - Overall, laid off employees have developed a general distrust in their previous employers. Distrust seems to stem from an in-congruence between what employers say versus what they do.. Below is an example response to help illustrate this sentiment:

I always knew that business will do what's best for them before thinking of their employees, BUT for a company that espouses "people first" and then for me to get laid off in the way I did, I found it very incongruent with who they present themselves to be...

• Loyalty - Laid off employees seem to no longer buy into the notion of employee loyalty, but rather see an opportunity to equalize relationships between themselves and employers.

How have views changed about work, in general?

• "Just a job" - Many respondents have expressed that they no longer see a point in going above and beyond for a role. This seems to be the case for those who were laid off, and those who remain employed. Below is an example response, to illustrate what this sentiment looks like.

I no longer strive for a job that I'm passionate about for fear of it being stripped from me a 3rd time. I've become extremely skeptical and cynical about work in general.

• To expand on the previous bullet, people seem to have become more open to jobs they may have not been open to before, even if it may mean less money or even working for a company that is lesser known.

My Opinion

Overall:

• I am not sure if companies learned a lot from the economic consequences of the pandemic (e.g. mass layoffs, followed by mass labor shortages, which were then followed by mass run-ups in competition for talent). If anything, it seems like from a labor economics perspective, we are running in a similar cycle, less than a few years later.
• Given the insight from the survey, I am also not sure how the talent pool will respond in the next recovery cycle.

So I won't bother with trying to predict the future. Doing that seems like a fool's errand...I am pretty sure that poor predictions of growth landed us here in the first place. :)

The end