Mass layoffs and survivor guilt

“What did we do wrong?”

The question haunts Mohit* every day. As an HR leader in a small organization, Mohit was recently asked to oversee layoffs impacting 10% of the workforce. Among those let go were a group of freshers barely six months into the first jobs of their lives, secured after a grueling selection process.

“‘They kept asking me, ‘What did we do wrong?’” Mohit remembers. “I had no answer.”

Then there was the employee who was fired after spending over 15 years in the company. “I had dragged him from another city [to comply with] our company’s return-to-office mandate. His wife was now jobless. His children were just settling in their schools. He asked me on his way out, ‘At least you could have let me be in my hometown, how do I face my neighbors now?’” Again, Mohit had no answer.

“Being in HR, I see layoffs coming at least a quarter in advance,” he says. “But I am bound by confidentiality and cannot warn the employees about it. Then as the layoffs start, it’s like a clock being turned backwards as it almost always ends with my own job hanging by a thread. The weight of handling all the exits leaves me drained and without the courage to move on.”

Mohit’s overwhelm has a name: survivor guilt, the feeling that you unfairly escaped harm while others could not. The term was coined in 1943 by neurologist Stanley Cobb and psychiatrist Erich Lindemann, who described it as the presence of tension, loneliness, or mental pain among survivors of a tragedy.