A practical, evidence-based guide for Chief People Officers and Senior HR leaders
It is 7:30am. Your calendar is wall to wall. By lunchtime, leaders across your organisation will sit with people they know well and tell them their role no longer exists.
You signed off the criteria. You approved the process. You stress-tested the business case. You know the numbers stack up.Yet still, as you read the scripts one last time, your chest tightens.
You can already picture the reactions across the table. Shock. Fear. Anger. Disbelief. Silence.
If you are a CPO or senior HR Leader, this moment will feel familiar. It is also rarely spoken about honestly.
This article is for you and the people you serve.
Most CPOs believe redundancy harm comes from poor messaging. In reality, it comes from how little we design the experience for the people delivering it. Here, we'll bring together organisational psychology, contemporary research, and lived experience to help you and your teams manage career transitions with humanity, clarity and care. Not as a soft add-on, but as a commercial and cultural necessity.
The missing protagonist in redundancy stories
Most redundancy conversations focus on two groups.
First, those impacted. Their grief, anger, relief, and uncertainty.
Second, those who stay. Often called 'Survivors', they carry guilt, fear, and increased workload.
There is a third group that deserves real attention; the people tasked with delivering the message.
Research on 'Redundancy Envoys' widens the lens to four groups you should plan for every time change involves job loss:
- Victims or Impacted: people whose roles end
- Survivors: people who remain
- Semi-survivors: those whose roles change or narrow
- Redundancy envoys: HR and line leaders who design and/or deliver the process
This research is qualitative rather than survey-based. It draws on repeated redundancy cycles and the lived narratives of HR practitioners. The finding is consistent and sobering.
Envoys often gain strategic capability under pressure. They become sharper decision-makers and more confident operators in complex systems.
But, they also pay for it.
Without intentional support, many experience emotional exhaustion, moral distress, and a slow drift toward self-protective detachment. This is not a personal failure. It is a predictable human response to carrying repeated emotional load without recovery. If you plan meticulously for risk, IR, comms and timelines, but leave envoy wellbeing to chance, you create a silent failure point in your change strategy.
Invitation to consider: When you plan the who, what and when of a restructure, do you plan for the emotional load on your envoys with the same rigour you apply to process and compliance?
What the wider research tells us
This pattern is not isolated.
Research into leading organisational change resulting in redundancy shows a common coping mechanism known as detached concern. It blends professional care with emotional boundaries. Used well, it allows leaders to act with composure and compassion.
Used without relief, it turns into emotional armouring.
Over time, leaders protect themselves by becoming emotionally armoured. Cynicism creeps in. Trust erodes quietly. Burnout follows.
Australian case studies reinforce this risk. Repeated exposure to redundancy delivery amplifies strain, particularly in organisations that move from one reduction to the next without pause, reflection, or support. This matters, because these same leaders are often the culture carriers you rely on post-change.
The 2025 context you cannot ignore
Australian organisations are still balancing selective hiring with targeted restructuring. Employment intentions remain positive, yet recruitment difficulty persists.
This keeps workforce reshaping firmly on the agenda.
For CPOs, this creates a constant tension. Build capability in some areas while reducing it in others. Maintain trust while making hard calls. Protect employer brand while delivering cost discipline. Global research reinforces what many leaders feel but struggle to quantify. Engagement, trust and discretionary effort often drop after redundancies, and they do not rebound automatically.
Flattened structures add further pressure. Fewer leaders carry more responsibility, including the emotional labour of explaining decisions and holding space afterward.
Invitation to consider: As you model the financial benefits of a headcount reduction, how explicitly are you modelling the engagement drag you will need to reverse, and the investment required to support those who must communicate and enforce the change?
Psychology you can put to work
Before we go further, something I have seen repeatedly in real organisations:
I have watched capable, values-driven leaders become emotionally armoured after their third or fourth redundancy cycle. Not because they did not care, to the contrary actually. It's because no one cared for them.
This is where theory becomes practical.
1. Detached concern, used wisely
Detached concern is not coldness. It is professional empathy with boundaries. Used well, it prevents leaders becoming procedurally safe but emotionally thin. It is professional empathy with boundaries.
It allows envoys to say, with sincerity, “I care about you,” without absorbing every emotion as their own.
Use it deliberately:
- Name it in training and briefings
- Normalise boundaries as professional skill, not lack of care
- Pair it with structured debriefs so emotion has somewhere to go
Without processing, detachment becomes distance. With processing, it becomes sustainability.
2. Psychological safety after day one
Psychological safety - Amy Edmondson's work spoken about so often in the zeitgeist - is not a slogan you roll out in a town hall.
After redundancies, safety is shaken at multiple levels. Belonging, confidence to learn, permission to contribute, and freedom to challenge all take a hit.
Rebuilding starts with inclusion, not performance rhetoric.
Be explicit:
- Who still belongs and why
- What matters now
- Where learning and questioning are explicitly encouraged again
Equip managers with this language. Do not assume they know how to say it.
3. Fair process, clear reasons, decent treatment
People judge change on more than outcomes.
They judge:
- Whether the process felt consistent and unbiased
- Whether they were treated with dignity
- Whether explanations made sense
Procedural and interactional 'justice' live or die in the behaviour of your envoys. Scripts matter. Sequencing matters. Tone matters.
This is where employer brand is actually protected or damaged.
4. Conservation of resources to predict burnout
Stress escalates when people lose resources, fear future loss, or fail to gain after effort.
Redundancy triggers all three for leavers, survivors and envoys.
Design support to replenish resources quickly:
- Time: protected recovery periods
- Energy: rotation of delivery roles
- Information: clarity on what comes next
- Community: peer debriefs and shared language
An EAP number alone does not replenish resources.
5. Transitions, not just change
Change is external. Transition is internal.
Transitions move through three phases:
- An ending, where people let go
- A neutral zone, marked by ambiguity and lowered confidence
- A new beginning, where identity and direction re-form
Leadership actions should match the phase:
- Name losses clearly at the ending
- Scaffold learning and clarity in the neutral zone
- Mark a new beginning only when people feel they belong again
Invitation to consider: Where will each audience be tomorrow morning, two weeks from now, and at quarter end, and what will you do differently at each point?
- Designing the envoy experience
Envoy capability should not be a by-product of survival.
Before you next enter a redundancy cycle, use this five-question envoy readiness check:
- Who is carrying the emotional load of delivery, and how evenly is it distributed?
- What training have envoys received beyond scripts and legal framing?
- Where is recovery explicitly scheduled into the plan?
- Who is checking in on envoys after the conversations, not just before them?
- What would tell us early that someone is becoming emotionally withdrawn or depleted?
If delivering the message is the work, designing for these questions is leadership.
Selection and preparation
Do not default to the same calm operators every time.
- Rotate responsibility with consent
- Train before you need it
- Practice the difficult lines aloud
- Anchor language in dignity and specificity
Preparation reduces harm for everyone involved.
Delivery teams, not solos
Redundancy delivery should be a team sport.
- Pair leaders with HR
- Use pre-briefs and post-briefs
- Maintain visible checklists for consistency and care
Consistency builds justice. Presence builds trust.
Recovery by design
Recovery is not indulgence. It is human.
- Build silence and pause into the day
- Avoid back-to-back notifications for the same person
- Schedule decompression intentionally
If delivering the message is the work, recovery is part of the work.
Peer consultation
Same-day huddles matter.
They allow envoys to share what landed, what did not, and where someone froze.
This replenishes social and cognitive resources and reduces burnout risk.
Invitation to consider: If you do nothing else, do this. Before notification day, ask every envoy one question: What support do you need to get through today?
- Communicating with those leaving and those staying
Clarity is kindness.
For those leaving:
- Start with unambiguous context
- Name criteria plainly
- Share the data that applies to them
- Be clear on what is final and what support is tangible
- Schedule follow-up time for questions
Sequence matters. So does language.
For survivors:
- Acknowledge survivor guilt
- Reconnect roles to purpose and near-term priorities
- Focus on inclusion first, stretch later
- Offer access to external support where needed, such as coaching, resilience support, or targeted capability-building, rather than assuming people can simply push through
One script does not fit all audiences.
Invitation to consider: Are your talking points differentiated for leavers, survivors and semi-survivors, or are managers expected to improvise?
- A humane, high-standards playbook
If you are facing organisational change involving job loss, this is a compact playbook you can adopt or adapt.
- Purpose and justice up front: Write the decision logic in plain language. Test it against fairness and dignity. Translate legal accuracy into human clarity.
- Design the envoy role: Select, train and support envoys explicitly. Teach detached concern and pair it with recovery.
- Sequence for transition: Pace communication to match endings, neutral zones and new beginnings. Track emotional stages alongside tasks.
- Resource replenishment: Rebuild time, energy, information and community for all groups. Resource gain breaks burnout cycles.
- Evidence the aftermath: Measure engagement, trust and retention after the reduction. The costs are real, and so are the returns when leaders invest.
- A final word
For people facing redundancy, clarity and dignity should be non-negotiable. Fair process, tangible support, and compassionate communication matter. For you as a Chief People Officer, your envoys and leaders need more than scripts. They need frameworks, space, and visible backing to carry this responsibility without burning out.
People deserve better.
If redundancy is inevitable, as it seems to be in our current context, then burnout doesn't have to be.
