How to support your team after redundancies

‍Redundancies happen. Public sector budget cycles have seen several peaks and troughs in recent years, and a good number of organisations are currently just emerging from a redundancy round while others are in the midst of one or facing one ahead. This guide is for leaders now working out what comes next.

Letting people go is never easy, and in a public sector environment it often means implementing decisions you had little control over. If that's been your experience, the redundancy period itself was likely one of the hardest stretches of your career as a leader. We've written separately about getting through that period with dignity and integrity. This guide picks up from there, with the team, and with leading it well now the process is over.

‍Name it and feel it

1. Acknowledge and explain what happened, honestly. Don't let the team move on without naming it, and avoid lines like "it had to be done". If you handled the process well, you'll have a genuine account of the purpose and objective behind the decisions. Give it, properly. A tidy non-explanation reads as discomfort and slows down healing. Real transparency moves people forward faster.

‍2. Be human about it, and let people process at their own pace. It's fine to feel sad, shaken, even a bit knocked by what happened. Going straight into business as usual isn't natural, and showing some humanity and fragility is what earns respect from the team, both those who stayed and those who left. People won't all get there at the same speed, and pushing everyone onto your timeline creates friction rather than closure.

‍3. Expect survivor guilt, and don't dismiss it. People who kept their roles often feel uneasy about it, sometimes more than they let on. This affects morale and engagement even when nobody says it out loud.

‍4. Resist the easy escape of quietly believing those who left had it coming. It's a natural, largely unconscious response, because it's more comfortable than accepting that people who made a real contribution are gone, and that you'd have preferred to keep them. The harder and more honest position is to hold onto that genuinely: they mattered, you valued them, and losing them wasn't the outcome you wanted. Your team will only believe you when you say it if they can see you believe it yourself.

‍Rebuild robustly

‍5. Start with individual conversations, then bring the team together. One-to-ones give people space to process and be heard in a way a group setting doesn't. Follow up with the team together too, because that's what regroups and galvanises the people who stayed, giving them a shared sense of moving forward rather than just individually coping.

6. Redistribute workload deliberately, not by default. When headcount drops, the easy option is spreading the old workload across fewer people. That's usually the wrong call. It needs a proper look at what the team's priorities actually are now.

7. Reconnect the team with its purpose, together. Bring the team back to what it's actually there to do, as a group exercise rather than a memo from you. Revisit priorities explicitly. A smaller team carrying the old remit is a route to burnout.

8. Use this as a chance to cull legacy processes. Some of what the team does day to day has stopped earning its place. The instinct after upheaval, especially among staff who feel unsettled, is to revert to routine, but running a full workload with fewer people isn't sustainable long-term. A stop/start/continue exercise, done with the team rather than handed to them, gives people back a sense of control and ownership. You may need to draw this out of people, some will be protective of processes, but will end up thanking you eventually if you help them redirect their time and energy onto things that matter.

9. Address the loss of institutional knowledge, then look forward. Some things that mattered got dropped in a rushed handover, and it's worth surfacing what's actually been lost. The period right after a restructure is also a genuine opening for new thinking, built by the team together over time rather than dictated from the top. It's a real chance to grow from the disruption, and one that's easily missed if the instinct is to let bygones be bygones and never talk about what happened again.

Move forward

‍10. Give the team a forward-looking story, not just reassurance. People need something to move toward, not just confirmation that the worst is over. A shared plan, even a modest one, gives the team something to organise around.

‍11. Pace the return to normal. There's often pressure to get back to business as usual quickly. Teams generally need longer than leaders expect to genuinely re-settle. It's often the leader who is eager to move forward too fast. That's a natural instinct, but one that can be unhealthy, unpopular, and result in an attempt to start rebuilding on unstable ground.

12. Look after yourself. Leading a team through this is demanding, and it draws on the same reserves you needed to get through the redundancy process itself.

Where Teamshaper can help

‍This is the kind of work we do with public sector teams as they come out the other side of change. Our Team Reset programme has been successfully delivered this year for several teams after restructure. With minimal investment in time and budget, we help facilitate many of the steps we've described here and set you and your team off after helping you process the change, map out what's changed, and set you off with newly mapped processes and tools to track and manage your newly defined ways of working.

You can read some case studies here and here.