It's Tuesday morning. The all-hands just ended. Your leadership team announced the restructuring, thanked everyone for their understanding, and logged off the call. Now your Slack is quiet. Too quiet. The kind of quiet that means everyone is talking, just not to you.

Here's what nobody tells you about layoffs: the hardest part isn't the decision. It's the morning after. It's looking at the remaining employees on your team and knowing that the people who are still here watched their colleagues get let go, and they're silently asking one question you can't dodge: Am I next?

Rebuilding trust after layoffs doesn't start with a town hall or a new vision deck. It starts with understanding that something broke, and pretending it didn't is the fastest way to lose the people who stayed.

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The Elephant That Ate the Room

I've worked with dozens of leadership teams navigating post-layoff fallout, and the pattern is almost always the same. The layoffs happen. The CEO sends the carefully drafted email. HR posts a tasteful note on LinkedIn. And then... everyone tries to move on as fast as possible. "Let's focus on the future." "Let's rally around our mission." "Let's get back to business."

It sounds right. It sounds strong. And it almost always backfires.

Because here's the thing about organizational change, this is significant: you can't skip the grief. People who just watched colleagues get laid off are not ready to rally. They're sitting in meetings, wondering if the person who used to sit across from them is okay. They're doing the mental math on who's left, what the workloads look like now, and whether their job security is real or borrowed time.

Research from the American Psychological Association consistently shows that layoff survivors experience a distinct psychological response. Anxiety. Disengagement. A sharp decline in the belief that their employer has their back. There's even a name for it: survivor's guilt. And if you don't address it directly, it metastasizes into something worse: quiet quitting, burnout, and a slow bleed of your best people toward the door. The cost is real, and it compounds fast. We broke down the full picture in The Importance of Building Team Trust.)

The impact of layoffs extends beyond severance packages. It echoes through every hallway and every Zoom call for weeks, sometimes months. Your remaining employees aren't just watching what happened. They're watching what happens next.

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How the Exit Shapes What Stays

Here's a pattern I've seen play out so many times it almost feels like a rule: the way you treated the people who left determines how much trust you can rebuild with the people who stayed.

Think about it from the team's perspective. They just watched friends and colleagues get let go. If those people were walked out with no notice, handed a box, and given a sterile email from HR, your remaining team members register that. They think: That's how this company treats people. That could be me. The narrative writes itself, and it's not a kind one.

But when a leadership team handles departures with genuine empathy, real severance, career transition support, honest and personal communication, something different happens. The remaining employees don't just feel relieved. They feel a small, fragile sense of trust that maybe, just maybe, this organization actually means it when they talk about values.

Brian Chesky at Airbnb showed this during the pandemic layoffs in 2020. When Airbnb had to let go of 25% of its workforce, Chesky didn't hide behind a press release. He communicated the financial reality openly. He offered generous severance, extended health benefits, and career services for every person laid off. He wrote a letter to the entire company that felt like it cost him something to write. It wasn't polished. It was honest. And the result? Airbnb didn't just survive. They rebuilt trust fast enough to IPO that same year.

That's not a coincidence. That's what clear communication and genuine care look like when the stakes are real.

One more thing: announce the restructuring in a live meeting. Not an email. Not a Slack message. A meeting where people can see your face, hear your voice, and ask questions. When you leave a vacuum, your team fills it with rumours. And the rumours are always worse than the truth.

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The Survivor's Guilt Problem Nobody Wants to Name

Let me tell you about a client I worked with. SaaS company, about 40 people. They went through a round of layoffs that cut their team by 20%. The CEO handled the exits well, fair packages, personal calls, and the works. But three weeks later, something strange happened. Productivity didn't recover. People were showing up to meetings but not really there. Two of their best performers, people who had nothing to worry about, started browsing LinkedIn.

When we dug into it, the answer was painfully simple. Nobody had given the remaining team members permission to talk about what happened. The layoffs were treated like a closed chapter acknowledged once, then moved past. But the team was still carrying it. They felt guilty for still having jobs. They felt anxious about being next. And they felt angry that nobody seemed to want to talk about the heaviness of it all.

This is survivor's guilt, and it's one of the most underestimated threats to retention after layoffs. If your team members can't process what happened, they don't just disengage. Their mental health suffers. Their well-being takes a hit. They start doing the minimum because investing emotionally in a place that might cut them loose feels too risky.

The fix isn't complicated, but it does require courage. You have to name it. You have to walk into a room (or a Zoom) and say something like: "What happened was hard. It was hard for the people who left, and it's hard for us too. I want to make space for that today." That's it. That's the reset.

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A Framework for the First 30 Days of Rebuilding Trust

When trust breaks on a team, and layoffs absolutely break trust, you can't just hope it comes back. You have to be intentional about rebuilding it. Here's a four-step framework we use at Unicorn Labs when working with teams navigating this kind of fracture.

Step 1: Have the Tough Conversation  and Have It Early

Most leaders wait too long. They think time heals, or that people will "move on." They won't. Not without a conversation.

Within the first week post-layoff, your leadership team should hold a dedicated session with the remaining team members. Not a rah-rah speech. Not a strategy update. A real conversation. Ask questions like: "How are you feeling about where we are?" and "What do you need from me right now that you're not getting?"

One-on-one check-ins matter here, too. Some people won't speak up in a group. Meet with your direct reports individually and ask the hard questions. "What's on your mind that you haven't said out loud yet?" Then be quiet. Let the silence do the work. If you need a framework for making those conversations count, start with our guide on why conversations are the most important leadership tool.

Step 2: Clarify What Changes  and What Doesn't

Layoffs create ambiguity, and ambiguity breeds fear. Remaining employees are wondering about their new roles, their adjusted workloads, and whether the restructuring is actually over. If you don't answer those questions, they'll assume the worst.

Be specific. If workloads are going to increase, say so. If there are new roles being defined, explain the timeline. If career growth paths have changed, lay that out clearly. People can handle hard truths. What they can't handle is feeling like no one is telling them the truth at all.

This is also where you co-create. Involve team members in redefining how the team will work going forward. When people have a hand in shaping the new reality, they're far more likely to invest in it. That's not just good leadership. That's how you build trust through shared ownership.

Step 3: Recognize Effort, Especially the Quiet Kind

In the weeks after layoffs, your team is going to be stretched. People will pick up tasks that aren't theirs. They'll cover gaps without being asked. They'll show up even when they're not sure they want to.

Notice that. Say it out loud. "I see what you did this week, and it mattered." Recognition doesn't need to be a formal program or an expensive initiative. It needs to be specific, timely, and real. When people feel seen during hard times, it creates a deposit in the trust account that no all-hands meeting can match.

Step 4: Stay Consistent Over Time

Here's where most leaders lose the thread. They do the town hall, they do the one-on-ones, they say the right things for a week or two, and then they drift back to business as usual. And the team notices.

Rebuilding trust after layoffs is not a sprint. It's a discipline. It's showing up to the same check-ins four weeks later. It's still asking "how are you really doing?" in month two. It's following through on every single commitment you made during the crisis.

Research from Brené Brown's work on trust makes this point clearly: trust is not built in grand gestures. It's built in tiny, consistent moments of reliability. The leaders who repair trust the fastest are the ones who understand that consistency is the message.

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Re-establishing Psychological Safety When the Floor Just Dropped

If you've read anything I've written or heard me speak, you know I believe psychological safety is the foundation of every high-performing team. Amy Edmondson's research at Harvard is unambiguous on this: teams that feel safe to speak up, take risks, and admit mistakes outperform teams that don't. Every time.

Layoffs blow a hole in that foundation. Because the implicit message of a layoff, whether you intend it or not, is: This organization will remove you if it needs to. And once that message lands, your team members stop taking risks. They stop raising concerns. They stop telling you what's actually going on because the cost of honesty suddenly feels too high.

Combatting this requires vulnerability from the top. Not the performative kind. The real kind. The kind where you, as a leader, stand up and say: "This is hard for me too. I don't have all the answers. But I'm committed to being honest with you as we figure this out."

That's what creates psychological safety. Not policies. Not surveys. A leader who is willing to go first. As I often say, trust must be first given freely. You can't wait for your team to trust you. You have to extend it first, especially when everything in your instinct says to protect yourself.

Moving Forward: Reconnect to Purpose, Not Positivity

There's a temptation after layoffs to push forced positivity. "We're leaner and meaner now!" "This is our chance to reinvent!" That kind of talk doesn't land. It feels tone-deaf because it is tone-deaf. Your team isn't looking for a pep rally. They're looking for a reason to believe their work still matters.

This is where reconnecting to purpose becomes essential. Not the poster on the wall. Not the mission statement on the website. The actual, tangible answer to the question: "Why does what we're doing matter, and how does my specific role contribute to it?"

Help remaining employees see the path forward. Be honest about what the company is building toward and why their contributions are critical to getting there. If there are upskilling opportunities or mentors who can support professional growth during the transition, make those visible. When people can see that the organization is investing in their career growth and not just using them to fill gaps, disengagement starts to reverse.

And don't just return to the old playbook. Use this moment to collaboratively redefine team norms, decision-making processes, and how you communicate with each other. The team that existed before the layoffs is gone. A new one is forming right now, in these first 30 days. You get to decide whether it forms around fear or around trust.

The 30-Day Truth

The long-term success of your organization after a restructuring isn't determined by the layoffs themselves. It's determined by what you do in the 30 days after.

Every founder, every VP, every team lead who navigates this moment well has one thing in common: they don't pretend the hard thing didn't happen. They walk into it. They name it. They sit with the discomfort long enough to build something real on the other side.

Rebuilding trust after layoffs is not about being perfect. It's about being present. It's about choosing the hard conversation over the comfortable silence. It's about understanding that the employee experience you create right now, in this fragile window, will define your culture for years to come.

Your team is watching. Not for speeches. For consistency. For honesty. For proof that you meant what you said.

That's the work. And it starts today.

Want to go deeper? Download our free guide to the Six Levels of High-Performing Teams and learn how to rebuild psychological safety, empowerment, and trust from the ground up.

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