Layoffs are painful. There's no way around it. If you're reading this, I'm guessing you're trying to figure out how to stabilize your team after layoffs. It might be tempting to just move faster and work harder to stabilize your team, but things get a lot more complicated when your team doesn’t trust the company anymore. And whether or not you were involved with the layoffs, they still view you as a representative of the company.

I wrote this to share what I wish someone had told me before I went through the same situation. You’re probably aware of each of these and try to practice them regularly, but, when dealing with layoffs, everything gets amplified. Remembering one of these might repair broken trust for one of your top performers while forgetting one of these might be the final straw when they decide to quit.

1. Ruthlessly prioritize
2. Be transparent
3. Reach consensus
4. Don't feed the cynics
5. Take care of yourself

The coming months won't be easy, but it's your job to help stabilize the team and get the business back on track. As long as you're mindful of your approach, you can be the difference between your team falling apart and your team banding together with a unified purpose.

Ruthlessly Prioritize

Layoffs just happened. You lost at least a few members of your team, and a lot of projects are instantly at risk. It’s hard enough to think about your roadmap now, but your internal stakeholders are too busy dealing with their own emergencies. It’s likely that your old team structure doesn’t apply anymore, which means you might need to shuffle staffing around. You may even need to cover for another manager who is no longer at the company, stretching you to new limits. Between more 1-1s, outdated roadmaps, and a deprecated team structure, it might feel like there physically isn’t enough time to do everything that needs to be done.

Although it might be tempting to fill your schedule and try to juggle as much as you can, that just isn’t sustainable. Take a step back and give yourself a week to assess which projects are critical, which teammates are flight risks, and which teams might be okay. You need to gather as much context as possible as quickly as you can so that you and your team can adapt as fast as possible. If you move too quickly, you’re likely to make a mistake while moving too slowly will only show your team that there isn’t really a plan to fix things.

Take a hard look at your projects and redefine what it means for something to be critical by asking the following questions:

1. Will the business fail if we drop this project?
2. Will people quit if we drop this project?

If the answer to each of these is “no”, you have your answer. Even if you answer “yes” to the second question, it still might be worth dropping the project when compared to everything else your team is responsible for. Sustainable engineering and investing in tech debt are great when you have a long-term plan, but investing in a two year plan doesn’t matter if your business isn’t around at the end of the year.

When I first learned of our layoffs, I had to reconsider which projects were essential. Any project that was at high risk from attrition and wasn’t critical to the business was immediately deprioritized in my mind. Identifying the projects that weren’t necessary helped me think of who could be freed up to help out with the projects that remained. The projects we ended up staffing addressed existential threats to our business. Nothing else could be justified.

Ruthless prioritization isn't just about what projects to focus on. How you spend your time is crucial to how quickly you can address the situation. When we lost several managers and individual contributors at once, I had to cover for five different teams and had more 1-1s than I could possibly handle alone. I took the first two weeks to listen to the teams I was the least familiar with to quickly identify who was thinking about leaving and which projects were at risk. Deprioritizing any action for the first two weeks was a painful choice, but it was necessary to make sure we didn’t make any long-term mistakes with our updated roadmap or team structure. If I hadn’t prioritized gathering that information, there was a good chance I would have operated under my old assumptions and pushed some engineers out of the company because they wouldn’t have received the support they needed.

Be Transparent

Once you decide what your team is still responsible for, be transparent with everyone. Whether or not you were involved in deciding who was let go, your team still views you as a representative of the company. That last decision made behind closed doors resulted in the company letting go people. This is your first chance to start rebuilding trust with the team by explaining what you’re focusing on and how you're thinking about stabilizing the team. Being honest with your team about what you don't have time to focus on also gives them a chance to step up and cover your gaps.

When I started figuring out how to deal with the aftermath of the layoffs, I sent out weekly emails to the team. At first, I was a little hesitant to send out mass communications on what I thought was important, but I quickly received feedback from the team that they appreciated visibility into our biggest challenges and updates on our overall progress. Several engineers responded by offering to help out with areas I said I didn't have time to address. I wouldn't have had the time to talk to everyone on the team and decide who could best support me in those situations. Instead the engineers were empowered to take ownership and be a part of the solution because I gave them enough information to understand what we all needed.

Your work to stabilize the team will likely go on for weeks if not months. Regular, transparent communication with your team gives them a chance to stay engaged with what is happening and see someone who represents the company (you) trying to fix the situation. Whether it's a recurring email, more frequent standups, or broadcasting announcements over Slack, take advantage of the spotlight you’re already under.

Reach Consensus

Once you make hard decisions, it can be tempting to move as quickly as possible. The reality is that making changes before you have buy-in from the team can actually burn whatever trust you have left. Team members might already feel that leadership is disconnected if they didn't agree with every single layoff decision. Add in a mandate that moves people around and re-prioritizes projects without getting buy-in and you have a recipe for a very unstable team.

Taking a few extra days to talk to team members in 1-1s and share broader context in team meetings can be an opportunity to help your team come to the same conclusions as you. These are also good opportunities to really refine the message you might have to send to the broader team when you announce your changes. Getting challenged by individuals in private discussions to solidify your external-facing messages is a great tradeoff.

When we initially moved people to focus on the biggest risks to our business, a lot of engineers disagreed with the new staffing and structure. Because we were so concerned about fixing the team structure as soon as possible, we didn’t take the time to get buy-in from the engineers. In the end, more than a few engineers openly voiced their frustrations, morale continued to sink, and a few people even left the team.

More recently, we had some simultaneous departures. This time, I asked for volunteers who were interested in staffing our critical projects, took a week to figure out staffing, and discussed the plan with each potential transfer before announcing the final changes. In the end, the engineers who moved over were excited to be on their new team. The engineers who stayed on their teams felt like it was the best decision for their team and their careers. As tempting as it can be to fix everything immediately, taking our time to get everyone on the same page was more than worth a few days of discussions.

Don't Feed the Cynics

No matter how smoothly your plan is going, some team members will invariably be skeptical, critical, or outright angry about what happened. As their manager, you might be tempted to offer some emotional support and empathize with them. After all, they probably have some valid points. Regardless of how much their frustrations may resonate with you, feeding those negative emotions can start a downward spiral for your team’s morale. If those emotions are left unchecked, your team will continue to voice those frustrations more openly and often.

This isn’t to say that you should ignore valid concerns. Acknowledging those frustrations is an important first step to building a dialogue with your teammates, but your job is to explain why the current state of affairs is acceptable or how you’re going to fix it. The more you remind people of how your solution addresses their concerns, the more they will internalize it.

Another way to help people who are frustrated is to have them spend more time with others across the team. This might seem counterintuitive at first, but it’s a lot easier to stay cynical if you work in a silo with two other people on a project that was hit hard by layoffs. Being surrounded by more people with a diversity of thought can mellow out more extreme emotions.

After adjusting staffing across projects, I worked with other managers to have more broad team meetings and increased collaboration across our teams. A lot of engineers who had been very frustrated ended up toning their rhetoric down and adopting a more balanced view. It’s okay if not everyone is excited while you’re fixing things as long as nobody is dragging morale down.

Take Care of Yourself

Know your limits. You might feel that the weight of the world is on your shoulders. So many people are counting on you, and the company’s success might rest on your plan to handle the layoffs. Just remember that you can’t take care of your team or the company if you burn out. Take some time each day to recharge, and find someone outside your team whom you can talk to about the challenges you’re dealing with.

Helping a team recover after layoffs doesn't happen overnight. Even if you come up with the perfect plan, the process might end up taking twice as long as you had hoped. More team members might leave, the company’s strategy might change, and you might wonder how you’re going to survive all of this.

Despite all of the potential challenges, there is an opportunity for you and your team to come out of this stronger than before. As long as you work together, rebuild trust in one other, and are deliberate about how you're going to fix your team, things can work out.

You've got this. Just don't forget to breathe every once in a while.