We all know that when people are laid off, or made redundant, it can be pretty stressful for the individuals concerned.  But it’s all too easy to forget that it’s not just these individuals who are affected.

Some while ago I was talking about this to a coach in the USA.  ‘What is this “made redundant”you are talking about?’ he asked me.  Somewhere in the back of my brain I remembered that the common US expression is ‘being laid off’.  I translated.  He was shocked.  ‘Made redundant! How can you say that about people?  They’re not on the scrap heap!’

No, they are not, but when you are made redundant, it can feel like that.  I’ve been made redundant twice, and the first time I felt terrible, even though I hated the job in question and was actively looking for something different.  The second time, though…that was life-changing, life-affirming and totally brilliant!

When one person is laid off, the effect is generally limited to them, their families and perhaps a few friends and colleagues.  But when a whole group are being made redundant, the situation changes.

For many people, work offers not just a source of income, but a social network.  Colleagues may also be friends, and for some people their colleagues are their family too.  In some industries, these bonds are very tight – as the story of the 33 Chilean miners reminds us.  In others, they are looser, but they are still there.

So when some people are laid off, but others are kept on, there’s a double, or even a treble, whammy.  The individuals are stressed, and anxious about their financial future, their families are stressed, for similar reasons and because the loved one is stressed.  Meantime, people who haven’t been laid off experience a kind of survivor’s guilt, which can also be deeply stressful.  And that stress spills over into the survivors’ families as well…

For the managers who have to deliver the bad news, it is deeply stressful too  It can be a profoundly distressing experience to tell someone that you can’t keep them on, no matter how much you want to, particularly when you have little control in the matter, or  they happen to be friends as well as colleagues  – and so the managers’  families and freidns are affected too.

In organisations where big redundancy programmes are taking place, you often see an increase in overall absenteeism and time spent down the pub or in the bar.  Lunches get longer, working time gets shorter, and only the fear of getting put on the ‘list’ drags the survivors into the work place.  Productivity goes down.  Yet these costs are rarely factored into the costs of a ‘downsizing programme’.  There seems to be an assumption that the survivors will be so grateful they have kept their jobs, they will magically redouble their efforts to make up for the loss of colleagues.

Eventually it turns round, for the survivors at least.  But even for them it can take many months to recover.

So I foresee an increase in stress in our society overall, at least here in UK, and the consequences of that in terms of an increase in stress-related diseases and incidences of anger and anti-social behaviour.  I’ve resisted the general pessimism about the economic downturn, but right now, I have to confess, I do feel pessimistic about how our society is going to react to the latest austerity programme.