RETAIN Series 8: The Cost of Silence

In brief:

• A published order of steps only matters if people hear about each step, and hear about it in time. Silence usually leads to failure.
• In a Careerminds survey of 1,000+ US workers, 50% of those who witnessed layoffs said that poor communication made them consider leaving. Laid-off workers who found the communication fair were more likely to land a new role within a month.
• A study of 1,620 retail stores found that layoffs triggered more resignations afterwards than any other kind of exit, and that high performers tend to follow high performers out.
• Silence is read differently across cultures, and the law often dictates who must hear first. Most of the available research is American, so I made sure to add evidence from the UK, the EU, Japan, and India.
• RETAIN’s pillar T prescribes seven things, from publishing the order of steps to adapting the communication channels to local norms. It’s not a guarantee of people not leaving.

In my early career, I worked with a colleague I looked up to as an example to follow. She was full of energy, clever and extremely self-driven. Unstoppable. She was a safety net, seen and unseen, for half of the team. She was there whenever someone needed her, even if that meant crazy hours or working weekends. She got things done and never thought it was anything special.

Slowly, she gathered a group of similarly motivated people around her. It was not a formal team. It was a network of people doing some extremely heavy lifting. Together they built and maintained the most robust processes I had ever seen.

Then the company got in trouble, and the inevitable layoffs began. Some people were affected for no apparent reason. The company gave its usual corporate newspeak explanations, or stayed silent. She witnessed all of it, and it took its toll. I could see her attitude slowly change. Anxiety, disillusionment and plain fright crept in. Eventually, she left. So did the few people from her informal group who were still there.

Many processes started to drift, and eventually they fell apart. It took more than 10 months to regain full control.

I am still in touch with her. She is a superstar (and super happy) at a smaller company, one known for good and candid communication and for listening to its people.

I ended article 7 describing the following rule: the order of steps is published before the crisis, so anyone can check if it was followed. There is a caveat to that rule – a published order only works if people hear about each step, and hear about it in time.

This is pillar T of RETAIN: Transparent, Regular Communication. The idea is simple: provide simple, frequent updates, especially during periods of high stress. The alternative is silence followed by a surprise announcement. This article is focused on what that silence costs and who pays first. It also includes a proposal for what a company should do instead.

Silence does not mean the same thing everywhere. Most of the studies I have found are US-focused. Where I could, I added evidence from the UK, the EU, Japan, India and other countries. A section further down looks at how culture impacts perception.

What silence costs

Careerminds surveyed more than 1,000 full-time US workers in Oct’25. Each had been laid off, or had witnessed a layoff on their team, during the previous 12 months.

• 50% of the people who stayed said poor communication made them consider leaving.
• Among those who called the communication poor, 59% of the laid-off and 53% of those who stayed said their trust in the company had fallen.
• Only 28% of laid-off workers rated leadership as very transparent. Another 23% said there was very little to no transparency.
• Among laid-off workers who found the communication fair, 39% got a new role within a month. Among those who found it unfair, only 22% did. After six months, 16% of the first group and 22% of the second still had none.

“Fair” is the word used by the workers themselves. Someone who lands a job quickly may remember the layoff as fairer, but the survey didn’t focus on that. Still, 39% against 22% within a month is a striking gap.

A second Careerminds report (Nov’25, with OnePoll) surveyed 500 US HR leaders and 500 US employees. 83% of the HR leaders thought leadership’s layoff messages were empathetic. 64% of the employees agreed. 63% of the employees said their company should have been more transparent. Careerminds adds that formal communication plans tend to end soon after the announcement. People are then left to wonder if the danger has passed and who is next, and silence is usually read as bad news.

Outside the US the picture seems to be similar, but the data is thinner. Careerminds UK reported that three in five UK workers lost trust in their employer after poor redundancy announcements. Only 28% of those made redundant felt leadership was clear about why they had been made redundant (Workplace Journal, May’26).

The perception gap crosses borders. LHH surveyed 3,000 HR leaders and 8,000+ employees in the US, Canada, Switzerland, the UK, France, Brazil and Australia (2026). 77% of the HR leaders said their company offers redeployment programs. 19% of the employees said they recognize them. A program that nobody knows about should be treated as not communicated.

Silence before the layoff

Silence starts well before the announcement. In Article 7 I cited Davis and Krolikowski, who had surveyed new unemployment insurance claimants in Illinois in autumn 2018. Around 60% of the people permanently laid off said they would have accepted a 5% pay cut to keep the job for another year. Fewer than 3% said their employer had discussed cuts in pay, benefits or hours as an alternative. Had the company shared the numbers early, many of these people could have chosen the pay cut and stayed. Silence took that choice away before anyone could make it.

A layoff with no warning often feels like a broken promise. Psychology calls this a psychological contract breach: the belief that the employer has not kept their promises. Zhao et al. (2007) pooled 51 earlier studies. A perceived breach led to more distrust of management, lower job satisfaction and a stronger intention to leave. But, counterintuitively, people who felt a breach were not more likely to actually leave.

That matters for how I read the Careerminds numbers. Because considering leaving is not the same as leaving, I prefer to treat them as a warning, not as a way to predict how many people may depart. As for the people who actually do leave, I write about them in the next section.

Waiting does not freeze the staff. People who fear for their jobs start looking before any cut is made. A review of 237 studies links job insecurity to a stronger intention to leave and more job searching (Låstad et al., 2025). A study that followed employees over time found that job insecurity predicted who actually left later (Richter et al., 2020).

Who leaves first

Sajjadiani, Kammeyer-Mueller and Benson surveyed 1,620 stores of a large US retailer over 22 months (Academy of Management Journal, 2023). The data covered more than a million employees, including their performance reviews. The authors asked what each kind of exit did to voluntary attrition afterwards.

• A layoff was followed by the most departures. In the month after layoffs were announced, many remaining employees left of their own accord. On average, each person laid off was followed by ca. 2.2 further resignations. For each person who resigned, the figure was 0.23. For each person dismissed, it was 0.17.
• A dismissal removes a person for their conduct or performance. A layoff removes a job, often without a clear link to how well the person performed. That is why colleagues of a dismissed worker might barely react, while those of a laid-off worker feel threatened.
• The effect was strongest among workers of similar performance. When high performers left, more high performers quit. When low performers left, more low performers quit.

In article 4 I claimed that a forced layoff curve leads to a loss of people with the most options. Careerminds makes the same point, looking at it from the other side. In its account, the staff with the most external options, market value and institutional knowledge are the ones most likely to read a layoff as a signal about where the company is heading, and to act on it.

What can a company do? Sajjadiani’s advice, as reported by Fortune, is to say openly why someone left or was dismissed, within legal limits. She says this calms unrest and can prevent bigger attrition.

The same silence read differently

Silence is not read the same way everywhere. Edward Hall split cultures into low-context and high-context communicators. In low-context cultures, good communication is explicit and often put in writing. In high-context cultures, much is implied and the listener reads between the lines. 

Erin Meyer built her Communicating scale on the same idea. In her examples, Japan is the most high-context country and the US sits at the low-context end. The UK is somewhat higher-context than the US. The French are more implicit than the Americans, and so on.

Meyer says low-context people often complain that high-context colleagues hold information back. High-context people, in turn, can find low-context communicators condescending. She also writes about a Chinese journalist who was helping her as a country expert and stayed silent for about three hours in a session she led. It turned out he was waiting to be called on and believed that silence showed good listening. In high-context cultures, she writes, silence can carry meaning.

For a company, the lesson seems clear. The same pause can read as tact in one office and as concealment in the next. So I would not leave silence to be interpreted. I would say what it means. Say what the pause means and when the next word comes: “No update this week means no decision has been made. The next update is on 14 November.” Where people read between the lines, ask local managers to repeat that message in person.

Two further points add important nuance:

• Jayaweera, Bal, Chudzikowski and de Jong (2021) pooled 134 studies on psychological contract breach and matched each study’s country to national culture scores. Culture changed how strongly the breach was correlated with job performance and turnover. Uncertainty avoidance did not. 
• The law plays an important role in who can hear what, and when. Under the EU Directive on collective redundancies (98/59/EC), an employer who contemplates them must consult the workers’ representatives in good time and give them the reasons in writing. At that stage the representatives, not each employee, are the formal audience. In Japan, redundancy dismissal faces stringent legal tests, including proof that the employer first tried to avoid it. Pinsent Masons notes that skipping consultation with the union can bring disputes or legal challenges, and that most companies rely on voluntary retirement programs or negotiated packages. I will touch on the legal detail in the N post.

Silence, rung by rung

Articles 5 to 7 were about climbing the ladder. At each rung, silence means something different and entails a different cost.

• Hiring freeze: In Apr’26 Meta closed ca. 6,000 open roles. It disclosed this in the same memo that announced a cut of ca. 10% of its staff. A freeze is the cheapest warning a company can give. Announced together with the layoff, it warned no one, and people had no time to prepare.
• Contractors: In Aug’25 Wired reported that more than 200 contractors who rated Google AI responses were let go. The workers said they had no warning. Google said they were employed by a vendor, which was responsible for their employment and working conditions. The full-time people watched their colleagues simply vanish. They had every reason to ask who is next.
• Pay cuts: At Gravity Payments the staff were asked to name their own cuts. My friend’s company in Post 7 discussed it with the staff first. If asked, people can choose and the company gets the savings and keeps the trust.
• Buyouts: Microsoft made a retirement offer in Apr’26, laid people off in Jul’26 and offered voluntary exits in Oct’26. Employees could only guess if there was a plan. Each new offer raises the question of whether it is the last one. People with the most options take voluntary offers first. If they cannot see the plan, the people the company most wants to keep are the most likely to leave.
• Exits in India: On 30 Jul’25 TCS announced cuts of ca. 2% of its staff, over 12,000 people, to run until Mar’26. The Karnataka labour minister said the company had not informed his department. Unions alleged that employees were being pressured to resign. In the following days more than 100 Bengaluru employees approached unions, and the Labour Department called TCS to a conciliation meeting. TCS said it would provide benefits, outplacement and counselling.
• Layoffs: Airbnb told people in one-on-one conversations. Better.com used a group conference call. I asked a question in article 7 – which method did less harm? Severance differed, but so did the way the people were told. Those who stay judge the company by how their colleagues were treated.

In most of these cases, employees could only take a guess at the order of steps. That is the gap T is meant to close.

What T prescribes

T is RETAIN’s pillar for Transparent, Regular Communication: simple updates, made frequently, especially during high-stress periods. Here is what I propose a company commits to:

1. Publish the order of steps before the crisis. Say who decides when to move to the next rung and what triggers the move.
2. Announce each step on the day it happens. Everyone affected hears the same message and the reason. A freeze, a contractor cut and a pay cut each get a separate announcement and a separate reason. For example: on the day hiring stops, all staff read “Hiring is frozen until the end of the quarter. Open roles will be filled from within where possible.” On the day contracts end, the contractors and their teams hear together: “We are ending these agreements because the project is closed.”
3. Keep a fixed rhythm during a crisis, announced in advance. An update every two weeks, for example. When there is nothing new, say so. Careerminds notes that silence after an announcement is read as more bad news to come.
4. Explain departures. When someone leaves, by choice or not, tell the team why, within legal limits.
5. Say what is not known, and promise only what you can keep. In Article 6, I made the same point about reduced hours: say plainly what the scheme can and cannot do. Use plain words. Phrases like “rightsizing” or “simplified operating model” blur what is happening, and expecting people not to notice is a folly (and often an insult to intelligent people). Stanford’s Robert Sutton says executives believe vague language keeps people calm, and that it has the opposite effect. He calls it “jargon monoxide” (Bloomberg, Feb’24).
6. Ask the staff after each announcement whether the message got through, country by country. HR leaders said the messages were empathetic more often than employees did (83% against 64% in the Careerminds data). Act on the answers. If people in a certain country say they did not understand, repeat the message there through the channel they trust, in a way that works, before the next step is announced.
7. Adapt the communication, not the facts. The facts and the reasons stay the same in every country. The channel, the style and the timing change. Law sets who must hear first: in much of the EU, the workers’ representatives. Local habit drives how directly it’s done: in a high-context culture, a direct message may need a conversation with the manager first. Consult with the staff in each country how they would want to hear it.

Most of this costs little money. It costs the time of senior people (but that’s arguably one of their core responsibilities) and the discomfort of speaking before they have all the answers.

What communication does not guarantee

Good communication does not make a layoff painless, and it does not guarantee that good people stay. Zhao et al. found no link between a psychological contract breach and actual attrition rates. Careerminds measured only who considered leaving (not whether people actually ended up leaving or not). Some things cannot be shared at all: a deal under negotiation, a named person’s performance, a consultation that has legal steps of its own. That is why “within legal limits” is a non-negotiable part of T.

Nobody should learn that a step has been taken from a rumour or from a news story. A company that is the last to tell its own people has already lost the argument about what the step means. That is the test I would apply to any company’s next round of cuts: how did the employees hear about it, and when?

I need to mention one more limitation at this point. Most of the studies I have cited are American. The rest is mostly surveys by outplacement firms, legal frameworks and press reports. For Japan and India I found legal frameworks and press reports, but no study of layoff communication. I’d love to gather as much international data as possible so, if you know of any good studies, please send me a word!

Next in this series: A, aligned leadership incentives.

Sources

• Careerminds Layoff Communications Report (1,000+ US workers, Oct 2025): Careerminds, October 22, 2025
• Careerminds, The Hidden Costs of Layoffs (500 HR leaders and 500 employees, US, Nov 2025): Careerminds, Layoff aftershocks
• Careerminds UK, poor redundancy communications: Workplace Journal, May 26, 2026
• LHH, 2026 Career Redeployment and Outplacement Trends Report (seven markets): LHH press release via Newswire, April 21, 2026
• Davis and Krolikowski (Illinois claimants, autumn 2018): Microeconomic Insights, November 11, 2025, summarizing the American Economic Review paper of February 2025; also a source of Article 7
• Zhao, Wayne, Glibkowski and Bravo (2007), Personnel Psychology 60(3), 647-680: summarized in the QIC-WD umbrella summary
• Låstad et al. (2025), Moving on up now? A meta-analysis of the associations between job insecurity and career-related outcomes (237 studies): Stockholm University Press
• Richter, Vander Elst and De Witte (2020), Job insecurity and subsequent actual turnover: rumination as a valid explanation? Frontiers in Psychology 11: Frontiers
• Sajjadiani, Kammeyer-Mueller and Benson (2023), Academy of Management Journal: DOI 10.5465/amj.2021.1327; coverage in Fortune, February 22, 2023 and the World Economic Forum, May 2023
• Erin Meyer, Working Across Cultures and Knowing When to Shut Up (ChangeThis 121.03); on Japan, the US and the UK: Nordic Business Forum, Erin Meyer summary
• Jayaweera, Bal, Chudzikowski and de Jong (2021), Cross Cultural & Strategic Management 28(3), 574-599: DOI 10.1108/CCSM-07-2020-0137; abstract read at Emerald
• EU Directive 98/59/EC on collective redundancies: European Commission, collective redundancies
• Redundancy in Japan: Pinsent Masons Out-Law, restructuring in Japan
• TCS, Jul’25: The South First, forced resignations and mass layoff
• Sutton, “jargon monoxide”, and layoff euphemisms (Bloomberg, Feb 2024): Fortune, February 10, 2024
• Meta, the Google contractors (Wired), Gravity Payments, Microsoft, Airbnb and Better.com: see the sources of Articles 6 and 7