Why Recent Layoffs and Unaddressed Employee Grief Are Hurting Your Company’s Bottom Line
By Megan Shen for Entrepreneur
It’s no mystery that continued major waves of layoffs in the tech industry are causing suffering for those who are being laid off. But a major elephant in the room is overlooked among remaining employees: grief. Ignoring the grief that the remaining workers are experiencing threatens to impact the remaining workers’ well-being and companies’ bottom lines negatively.
More than 234,000 tech workers have been laid off this year. Major companies like Amazon, Spotify and Meta have cut tens of thousands of workers’ jobs this year, including Google’s recent round of layoffs this September. Obvious to most business analysts is that these large-scale layoffs create instability and inefficiencies within teams. What is less obvious, however, is that many remaining employees are dealing with grief around the loss of coworkers, work rhythms and stability amidst continued layoffs.
Research demonstrates and experts have long warned that layoffs cause detrimental effects on both individual employee performance and corporate performance. Additionally, major layoffs can cause issues for companies in future employability because future candidates remember how companies handled economic uncertainty through massive layoffs.
What is notably missing from the conversation around the current tech layoffs, however, is that many major companies are now facing a grief problem amidst their remaining workers. Failing to address this issue may make workers suffer and cost companies a lot of money through the loss of worker productivity, efficiency, and satisfaction.
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