Layoffs in Strong Companies
In recent years, many companies have announced large rounds of layoffs, sometimes while still reporting strong financial results. For employees, this can be confusing — if the organization is not in crisis, why must people lose their jobs? For leaders, the explanation often comes down to discipline, restructuring, or preparing for uncertain times. Both views exist, both carry their own logic, and both leave questions behind.
When Loyalty Feels Like Baggage
From an employee’s perspective, the experience feels deeply personal.
If times are difficult, why am I asked to face them alone instead of with the team I was part of? When did I become baggage to the organization I contributed to? If my role had become less relevant, why was I not trained earlier, when I was still inside the system?
These questions are not about entitlement but about continuity. They reflect a belief that the collective should carry individuals through difficult times, just as individuals contribute when times are good.
Loyalty feels different when it is not returned.
Decisions Framed as Survival
From the organization’s perspective, the answers sound different. A company is not designed to guarantee roles indefinitely — it is built to sustain the organization as a whole. When functions lose relevance, or when growth projections shift, leaders feel pressure to respond quickly. Redeployment or retraining may be possible in some cases, but not always at the speed markets demand. In this view, difficult choices about individuals are framed as necessary for the survival of the larger group.
The Incentives Behind the Actions
Beyond leaders and employees lies the system itself — the set of incentives and rules that guide how organizations behave. This system often rewards speed, efficiency, and visible action more than patience or loyalty.
Financial markets tend to applaud cost reductions. Analysts interpret layoffs as discipline, a signal that leadership is willing to act decisively. Boards measure success through quarterly earnings and margins, which rarely capture the value of culture, trust, or long-term skill building. Governments, depending on context, may provide safety nets or remain hands-off, but in either case the boundaries of action are set outside the control of individuals.
In such a design, our behavior is shaped less by personal values and more by the incentives around us. A leader may believe in shared sacrifice, but if delaying layoffs leads to investor pressure and falling stock value, the space to act differently narrows. An employee may believe that loyalty secures belonging, but if the system defines relevance in terms of financial contribution, that loyalty holds limited weight.
The result is a cycle: growth slows, analysts downgrade, boards push for action, companies announce cuts, stock prices rise, executives are rewarded, and employees absorb the disruption. No single actor sets this chain in motion, but each of us plays our part within it.
The machine moves, even when no one wants to push it.
The Visibility of Leadership Choices
Layoffs are often framed as difficult but necessary — yet the financial impact rarely falls evenly. Employees lose their jobs, while executives often retain their compensation or even receive rewards for cost-cutting. From the outside, this creates a visible contrast between those who carry the immediate loss and those who continue to lead.
Leaders operate under constant pressure from boards, markets, and investors to act quickly and maintain confidence. Their pay structures, often set long in advance, are designed to signal continuity and control, not indifference. Cutting their own compensation may have little financial effect but can introduce new risks — unsettling markets or creating uncertainty when steadiness is most needed.
Both perspectives hold their own truth. For employees, the absence of shared sacrifice can feel like distance. For leaders, stability can feel like duty.
The same decision can look firm from one side and detached from another. And perhaps that’s the nature of leadership — to be seen differently, depending on where one stands.
Layoffs as Human Events
Layoffs also bring an emotional weight that goes beyond numbers. For those leaving, the stress is immediate — financial uncertainty, disruption of routine, and the sense of identity tied to work suddenly cut off. For those who remain, there is survivor’s guilt, anxiety about the future, and reduced trust in the stability of their own roles. Even leaders, though often viewed as distant decision-makers, carry pressure of a different kind: knowing that their choices affect lives, while also being measured against unforgiving financial targets.
This stress reminds us that layoffs are not only structural adjustments. They are human events that touch us all in different ways.
The impact lingers long after financial charts move on. Culture changes quietly, long before balance sheets notice.
Employees, Organizations, and the Larger Ecosystem
A common expectation is that working for a well-regarded company provides security. Yet even the best companies cannot guarantee permanent jobs. What they can offer are opportunities for learning, growth, and contribution. Here, responsibility does not end with the organization. Employees also carry a role: to remain skillful, to adapt as industries change, and to build their own safety nets — financial, professional, and social. This shift in perspective moves the focus from job security to career resilience.
Organizations, for their part, exist primarily to create value and profits. Jobs are not their final purpose, but one of the ways in which they achieve outcomes. The best organizations try to balance this profit orientation with humanity — by creating learning opportunities, supporting transitions, and avoiding unnecessary harm. Still, their actions are shaped by wider dynamics: market cycles, investor expectations, and competitive pressures. Even with good intentions, no company can offer stability to every individual.
But when we step back, we see that both employees and organizations contribute to the larger ecosystem. Employees carry their skills and values across roles and companies, strengthening society as a whole. Organizations generate opportunities and progress while pursuing profits. The system does not remove responsibility from either side. But it does set the boundaries within which all of us must act.
Speed with Humanity
If layoffs remain a tool companies reach for, the question becomes how to manage them in ways that do less damage to trust and culture. Certain policies can provide balance while still allowing organizations to act quickly.
Not everyone may agree with these approaches, and my own thoughts may evolve with time. But today, when I reflect on what could bring some balance, these steps feel like a better way forward:
- Continue health benefits for up to a year
- Extend access to learning resources even after departure
- Facilitate job transitions by connecting departing employees to new opportunities
- Reduce workweeks temporarily or allow voluntary salary cuts before job losses
- Link executive rewards directly to workforce stability
These measures are not meant to dilute urgency. Speed, adaptability, and financial recovery remain critical to organizational survival. The intent is not to make decisions slower, but to make them fairer — to design responses that act quickly without eroding trust. When empathy outweighs efficiency, execution falters; when efficiency ignores empathy, culture weakens. The true balance lies between the two.
Living Inside the System We Built
Layoffs illustrate the tension between loyalty and efficiency, between individual expectations and systemic rules. Employees, leaders, investors, and governments all play their roles, yet the system often shapes behavior more than any one person’s intent.
The question is less about blame and more about balance — how to preserve efficiency without losing humanity, and how to distribute opportunities so more people can flourish.
Tulsidas ji wrote:
दया धर्म का मूल है, पाप मूल अभिमान।
तुलसी दया न छोड़िये, जब लग घट में प्राण॥
Meaning: Compassion is the root of righteousness; pride is the root of wrongdoing.
In today’s context, it reminds us that empathy belongs to everyone — to employees facing loss, to leaders making difficult choices, and to stakeholders carrying expectations of growth.
Each sees the system from a different distance, yet all are bound by it. Empathy, in the end, is not sentiment but understanding — the ability to see another’s position without surrendering your own.
And perhaps that is enough — not to remove the tension, but to live with it consciously. Because in the end, we all live inside the system we have built.
Disclaimer:- This piece is not about any single company or moment — only about the shared systems we all live and work within.
Quiet Reflections 