My daughter is nineteen and in her second year of university. For almost two years she has also worked at a restaurant - seating guests, running plates, and clearing tables. Something I love about where she works is her community of co-workers. She is a committed and loyal worker. Over these two years I've watched her confidence grow as her steadiness has earned her the respect, and the friendship, of the people she works with. This month her employer unexpectedly began a round of layoffs, and she doesn't yet know whether she will be kept on.
As I've listened to her sit with that uncertainty, I've found myself recognizing the familiarity of what I’ve been observing over the past few years in some of my coaching conversations, with leaders in different industries and parts of the world. The places and roles are different, but the question underneath feels similar: what happens next?
I don't remember this being part of my own early working life, and I'm struck by how commonplace it has become. I hear about layoff rounds as though they are simply part of the rhythm of the year. And yet I don't think it ever becomes ordinary for the people living through it. I notice how uncertainty seems to settle into people’s bodies (tighter shoulders, shallower breaths, and difficulty sleeping) and how it travels home with people, to their partners, children and pets, long after the workday ends.
I think about the larger forces behind all of this, and there isn't one simple cause to point to. In most organizations, the rapid adoption of AI is changing what leaders need, and the word restructuring has stretched to encompass a lot. In many businesses, rising costs press inwards from every direction, while customers, feeling the pinch themselves, spend less.
Underneath it all there seems to be a slow loosening of the unspoken understanding that our loyalty and effort will be met with a sense of belonging. I'm not sure anyone set out to change that agreement but it certainly seems to be wearing thin.
It's understandable that many people are concerned about where all of these layoff rounds are leading to: what's next for themselves, for colleagues who have already left, for the places they've given so much to, and for work and careers more broadly. It feels important to pause to acknowledge the people I know are carrying this, because it seems to me that each of them carries it a little differently.
For those who have been let go, there is the very real loss of income and security, and alongside this, losses that are often harder to see: the loss of a daily rhythm, of a community and place, and of a sense of being part of something. For hardworking people who are loyal by nature, as my daughter is, I imagine it can feel deeply personal, even when it isn't meant that way, and can unsettle a sense of who they are and where they belong.
My hope is that, in time, it becomes possible to see that the care and presence they brought to their work was never held only by that role, and that it goes with them.
For those who remain, I've come to understand that staying brings its own kind of weight. There is often more work to absorb, the quiet of empty office spaces and chat channels, and the absence of colleagues and friends who left without much chance for an adequate goodbye. There can be a sadness that doesn't quite feel permitted, because after all, you still have a job. And there is often a lingering uncertainty about how fully to commit again, knowing there could be more layoff rounds ahead. I also think about how much of a company's culture lives in its people, and what happens to that culture when many of them leave at once.
And then there are the leaders who make these decisions or are asked to carry them out. They may be holding information they can't yet share while continuing to work alongside people they care about. They may be weighing names, knowing each one belongs to a whole life beyond work. Often they are expected to stay steady for everyone else, with little space for their own sadness or doubt, and their own uncertainty. Their vantage point can show them pressures and trade-offs that others don't see, and yet seeing rarely makes it easier.
I keep returning to my daughter's loyalty, and to the many exceptional people I know who are wired the same way. When the places we give ourselves to can't promise to hold us, I don't think the answer is to stop caring, because that would ask us to give up something in ourselves. It might instead be an invitation to notice where our loyalty truly lives: perhaps with the care we bring to our work, with our own values, and with the kind of person we hope to be, whatever our circumstances. This kind of loyalty feels like something that can stay with us, wherever we go.
None of us knows quite where all of this is going. What we can tend to is how we are with one another in the not knowing. It could be reaching out to a colleague who has left or checking in with one who has stayed. It could be that we make a little room for grief, including our own, or noticing when our bodies are bracing and in need of a fuller breath, a walk outside, or a moment of rest.
Image by Viktor Nikolaienko, Unsplash Images