Tech companies around the world cut more than 45,000 roles in the first ten weeks of 2026. Block removed 4,000 employees globally, nearly half its workforce. Atlassian eliminated 1,600 positions. WiseTech announced 2,000 cuts over two years. Commonwealth Bank of Australia trimmed 300 tech roles. Every announcement pointed to AI as the catalyst, and every announcement carried the same subtext: more cuts will follow.

Every headline frames redundancies as a story about the people who lost their jobs. That matters enormously. But a second workforce exists inside each of these organisations, one that attracts almost no attention and presents a larger long-term risk to the workplace itself.

I am talking about the people who stayed. The ones sitting at their desks the Monday after the announcement, doing the same job with fewer colleagues, less certainty, and a workplace that feels fundamentally different from the one they walked into a week earlier.

Redundancies change the workplace, not just the headcount

Most organisations plan redundancies as a headcount exercise. They model the financial savings, draft the severance packages, prepare the investor communications, and execute. What they almost never plan for is the workplace that remains after the cuts take effect.

That workplace looks the same from the outside. The Slack channels still exist. The project boards still show deadlines. But everything that makes a workplace function, the trust between colleagues, the informal knowledge networks, the shared understanding of how things get done, has fractured at its foundation.

Organisational psychologists call the phenomenon "survivor syndrome," and they have studied it for over four decades. Professor Joel Brockner at Columbia Business School pioneered this research in the 1980s, and the findings have held up across industries, geographies, and economic cycles. A summary by the Stockholm School of Economics describes the pattern as consistent and well-documented: redundancies damage the workplace environment for everyone who remains, not just those who leave.

Research from Harvard Business School shows that layoffs carry hidden costs that consistently make companies less profitable, less innovative, and less productive than they expected. Professor Sandra Sucher, who has studied downsizing extensively, describes layoffs as "hope triumphing over science," pointing to study after study showing negative outcomes. A large-scale U.S. study published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health found that downsizing had an adverse association with nine out of 12 assessed work conditions and all 16 employee outcomes measured, including physical and mental health, job satisfaction, organisational commitment, and turnover intentions. The Stockholm School of Economics summarises the research plainly: survivors consistently develop negative reactions including anger, depression, fear, distrust, and guilt, and these psychological burdens reduce worker productivity and creativity while increasing their intention to leave.

One particularly striking finding from healthcare sector research suggests that the employees who remain may actually fare worse than those who leave. Survivors in that study reported lower job satisfaction, poorer physical health, and a lower quality of life compared with colleagues who had been made redundant and moved on. The workplace itself becomes the source of ongoing harm.

How redundancies reshape daily working life for the people who remain

The impact of redundancies does not land as a single event. It reshapes the daily experience of work across weeks and months, touching every aspect of how people operate inside the workplace. Here is what the research predicts, and what I observe consistently when working with organisations after significant workforce reductions.

The workplace becomes a place of sustained anxiety

After redundancies, the workplace stops feeling stable. Remaining workers refresh Slack wondering if another round is coming. They parse every leadership message for hidden signals about future cuts. They read the room in every team meeting, watching who speaks and who stays quiet.

When Atlassian CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes acknowledged that AI "changes the mix of skills we need or the number of roles required in certain areas," every remaining Atlassian employee heard a conditional statement about their own future. When Block CEO Jack Dorsey predicted that most companies would undergo a similar shift, survivors at every tech company took that as a personal warning. That sustained state of alertness is not a personality trait. It is a predictable response to unmanaged job insecurity, one of the 17 psychosocial hazard categories that employers must manage under workplace safety law.

Workloads increase without anyone assessing whether they are sustainable

The work does not disappear when the people doing it leave. It redistributes across the remaining team, almost always without any formal reassessment of capacity or resourcing. At Block, 4,000 people walked out the door. Dorsey framed this as a shift to an "intelligence-native" model. But the customers those 4,000 people served still need support. The projects they managed still have deadlines.

In the workplace, this plays out as longer hours, skipped breaks, and a growing backlog that nobody acknowledges formally. Meetings that used to have six people now have three, but the agenda has not changed. The person covering a departed colleague's client portfolio still carries their own full book of work. Nobody sits down with the remaining team and asks: given the people we have lost, what can we realistically deliver, and what needs to stop?

High job demands are a recognised psychosocial hazard under every major workplace safety framework. The Code of Practice identifies both the volume of work and the pace of work as factors that organisations must assess. A psychosocial risk assessment conducted before or during a restructure would catch this. In most organisations, that assessment never happens.

Trust between remaining employees and leadership collapses

Remaining workers watch colleagues get removed and draw their own conclusions about what the organisation values. They stop raising concerns because they have seen what happens to those who stand out. They disengage from discretionary effort because the psychological contract that motivated that effort has been broken. They attend all-hands meetings and hear leadership explain that the redundancies were "the right decision for the long term" while processing the fact that the person who sat next to them was escorted out with a consultation window of just eight days.

In Australia, Professionals Australia described the Atlassian restructure as a "devastating blow" and stated that workers had been made redundant without prior consultation. The union demanded urgent consultation with both Atlassian and WiseTech. For the remaining workforce, that lack of consultation sends a clear message: if the organisation did not consult the people it removed, it will not consult the people who remain before making the next decision that affects them.

Poor organisational change management is a named psychosocial hazard for exactly this reason. The Code of Practice specifically identifies inadequate consultation, lack of information about changes, and uncertainty about the nature and impact of change as factors that create psychosocial risk. Worker consultation is not just an employment relations nicety. It is a control measure for the psychosocial hazard of organisational change.

Workplace relationships and team structures fracture

Teams are social structures built on relationships, shared history, and informal knowledge. Redundancies do not just remove roles from an organisational chart. They tear through the fabric of daily working life.

At Block's Australian arm, entire marketing teams at Afterpay were wiped out, including the CMO and VP of advertising. The colleague who remembered why a decision was made two years ago, who knew which stakeholder to call when a project stalled, who provided the emotional ballast when deadlines got tight, simply disappeared from the workplace. Remaining workers lose the people they relied on for informal support, context, and collaboration. Role clarity deteriorates as responsibilities shift without documentation. Collaboration slows. Decision-making stalls. Institutional knowledge walks out the door and does not come back.

The workplace loses people it never intended to lose

Here is the irony that most organisations miss. Research published in Harvard Business Review shows that redundancies frequently prompt surviving employees to quit. The workplace experience after mass cuts, the increased workload, the broken trust, the sustained anxiety, the fractured teams, drives the people who kept their jobs to leave voluntarily.

They update their resumes. They start taking recruiter calls they would have ignored six months ago. They leave for organisations where the workplace feels stable. This voluntary turnover creates the exact talent shortage the redundancies were supposed to prevent, and the workplace deteriorates further as remaining workers watch yet another round of colleagues disappear, this time by choice. The cost of replacing employees compounds the financial impact of the original redundancies.

Redundancies trigger specific psychosocial hazard obligations in the workplace

This is not just a people problem. It is an occupational health and safety obligation, and the regulatory landscape governing workplace psychosocial hazards is tightening across every major jurisdiction.

The global framework: ISO 45003

ISO 45003, published in 2021, is the first international standard providing practical guidance on managing psychological health and safety in the workplace. The standard sits within the ISO 45001 occupational health and safety management system and applies to organisations of all sizes, in all sectors, in every country. ISO 45003 explicitly identifies organisational change, job insecurity, excessive workload, and poor communication as psychosocial hazards that employers must assess and control. For remaining workers after redundancies, every one of those hazards is present in their daily working environment. Regulators around the world increasingly reference ISO 45003 as the benchmark for workplace psychosocial risk management.

European Union workplace obligations

The EU Framework Directive 89/391/EEC requires employers to ensure workers' health and safety in every aspect related to work, including psychosocial risks. EU-OSHA reports that nearly 45% of European workers already face risk factors that can adversely affect their mental health under normal conditions. For workers remaining after redundancies, those risk factors compound with the additional hazards of organisational change, job insecurity, and workload absorption. In 2025, European trade unions gathered at the ETUC-ETUI Conference in Brussels and pushed for a dedicated EU directive on workplace psychosocial risks. The EU's 2026 work programme includes drafting a formal opinion on mental health and psychosocial risks at work. Several member states already enforce specific national legislation: Belgium requires three tiers of workplace psychosocial risk prevention, Sweden has had legislation in place since 1974, and Denmark introduced specific psychosocial work environment obligations in 2020.

Australian workplace obligations under the WHS Act

Australia has some of the most prescriptive workplace psychosocial compliance obligations in the world. The WHS Act requires every person conducting a business or undertaking to identify, assess, and control psychosocial hazards in the workplace. The Model Code of Practice for managing psychosocial hazards at work names specific workplace hazard categories including poor organisational change management, job insecurity, high job demands, and poor support. SafeWork NSW committed to conducting psychosocial WHS checks at workplaces with 200 or more employees as part of its 2024 to 2026 Psychological Health and Safety Strategy. Victoria's Psychological Health Regulations took effect in December 2025. A single prosecution for workplace psychosocial hazard failures in Victoria resulted in a fine of approximately $380,000. Officers and directors carry personal, non-delegable due diligence obligations to ensure the organisation complies.

The common thread across every framework

Organisational change is a recognised workplace psychosocial hazard. Job insecurity is a recognised workplace psychosocial hazard. Increased workload is a recognised workplace psychosocial hazard. Poor change communication is a recognised workplace psychosocial hazard. Redundancies trigger all four simultaneously inside the same workplace. Employers who execute redundancies without conducting a psychosocial hazard identification and risk assessment for the remaining workplace face a compliance gap that carries real legal, financial, and human consequences.

The financial cost of workplace psychosocial harm to remaining workers after redundancies

The remaining workforce is where the financial damage accumulates. In Australia, psychological injury claims cost roughly four times more than physical injury claims and take approximately five times longer to resolve. Mental health claims have increased 161% over the past decade, making them the fastest growing category of serious workers' compensation claims nationally. All of that data comes from Safe Work Australia. Those claims come from the people still employed, the ones experiencing sustained job insecurity, absorbing unsustainable workloads, and operating in a workplace where trust has collapsed.

In the EU, stress, anxiety, and depression represent the second most common work-related health problem. The World Health Organization estimates that depression and anxiety cost the global economy approximately US$1 trillion per year in lost productivity. That productivity loss does not come from the people who were made redundant. It comes from the people still at their desks.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman described the practice of using AI as a justification for cuts driven by other reasons as "AI washing" in February 2026, noting that fewer than 1% of 2025 job losses could actually be traced to artificial intelligence. Whether the technology is genuinely driving these redundancies or serving as a convenient explanation, the psychosocial impact on the remaining workforce is identical. The cost of non-compliance compounds through claims from remaining workers, voluntary turnover of remaining workers, absenteeism among remaining workers, and long-term productivity loss across the remaining organisation.

How companies can better manage the workplace impact of redundancies

The gap I see most often is straightforward. Organisations treat redundancies as financial and operational decisions. They plan extensively around headcount, severance, and investor communications. They do almost nothing to assess or manage the impact on the workplace that remains.

Closing that gap requires treating redundancies as what they actually are under occupational health and safety law: an organisational change event that triggers specific psychosocial hazard obligations in the workplace. Here is what that looks like in practice.

Before redundancies: assess the psychosocial risk to the remaining workplace

Conduct a psychosocial risk assessment that examines the impact on the remaining workplace, not just the departing workforce. Map which psychosocial hazard categories the redundancies will trigger: organisational change, job insecurity, workload redistribution, support gaps, role clarity disruption, and social network destruction. Assess the severity and likelihood of harm for each. Document the assessment and the controls you plan to implement. Whether an organisation operates under ISO 45003, EU Framework Directive requirements, Australian WHS law, or the Canadian psychological health standard, this step is either legally required or strongly recommended by every relevant framework.

During redundancies: consult the remaining workforce, not just the departing one

Consult workers about the changes and their impact on the workplace during the process, not after decisions have already landed. Critically, this means consulting the people who will remain, not only the people being made redundant. The remaining workforce needs to understand what will change for them: how workloads will shift, what support is available, who owns which responsibilities going forward, and what the organisation is doing to manage the psychosocial risks the restructure creates. Worker consultation is a legal obligation in many jurisdictions and one of the most effective controls for managing the psychosocial impact of organisational change on the people left behind.

Communicate honestly about what is happening and why. Investor-facing language does not serve the workplace absorbing the consequences. Workers can tell when the stated rationale does not match the reality they experience. That dissonance erodes trust rather than building it. Be specific about what will change for remaining teams: who will own which responsibilities, what deadlines will adjust, and what support is available.

After redundancies: monitor the remaining workforce continuously

Assess whether workload redistribution has created unsustainable job demands for remaining workers and implement controls where it has. Conduct follow-up psychosocial risk assessments at 30, 60, and 90 days after the restructure to check whether the remaining workplace is stabilising or deteriorating. The first two weeks after redundancies often produce a false calm as remaining workers operate on adrenaline and compliance. The real impact typically surfaces at four to eight weeks, when the sustained workload, unresolved anxiety, and accumulated fatigue start showing up as absenteeism, disengagement, and the first voluntary resignations.

Ensure managers have the capability and support to lead their remaining teams through genuine uncertainty, recognising that managers themselves are survivors carrying their own psychological load. Invest in manager training specifically on psychosocial hazard identification so they can recognise the signs of harm in their teams early rather than waiting for a formal complaint or a workers' compensation claim.

Review workplace safety data continuously. Exit interviews from remaining workers who choose to leave, absenteeism patterns, turnover rates, team feedback, and informal channels all contain signals about whether the psychosocial impact on the remaining workforce is being managed or ignored. Track control effectiveness over time rather than treating the initial response as sufficient.

Build the evidence trail a regulator or board expects

Every step above needs to be documented. An inspector or board member asking "what did you do to manage the psychosocial risks of this restructure for the remaining workforce?" expects to see a structured record: the risk assessment conducted before the change, the controls implemented, the worker consultation completed, and the ongoing monitoring. This documentation also matters to the remaining workers themselves. When they can see that the organisation assessed the risks, consulted them genuinely, and put controls in place, it rebuilds some of the trust the restructure destroyed. When they cannot see any of that, they draw the obvious conclusion: nobody planned for what this would do to them.

How ReFresh helps organisations manage workplace psychosocial hazards during redundancies

For Australian organisations, ReFresh exists because the steps described above, risk assessment, hazard identification, control tracking, worker consultation, and governance evidence, deserve proper infrastructure. Most organisations attempt this through spreadsheets and ad hoc processes. That approach falls apart during a restructure, precisely when multiple psychosocial hazards interact simultaneously and the evidence trail matters most.

ReFresh gives organisations a single place to manage the full compliance lifecycle a restructure demands: identify which of the 17 hazard categories the change triggers, assess the risk, deploy controls, consult the workforce, and produce the documentation a regulator or board expects to see. Every Australian employer has a duty to manage psychosocial hazards in the workplace. ReFresh turns that duty from a compliance burden into an operating system.

This is not just a tech problem

The hook for this article is tech because that is where the headlines are right now. But the psychosocial hazards of redundancies apply to every sector. Healthcare systems restructuring under budget pressure. Universities cutting academic roles. Retail chains closing stores. Manufacturing operations consolidating sites. Every one of these creates the same pattern: organisational change, job insecurity, increased workload, poor communication, fractured teams. The WHS Act, ISO 45003, and the EU Framework Directive do not distinguish between industries. The obligation is universal.

If your organisation is planning, executing, or recovering from a restructure of any kind, the question is not whether psychosocial hazards exist in your workplace. They do. The question is whether you have identified them, assessed the risk, and put controls in place. If the answer is no, the gap between what your workplace is experiencing and what the law requires is where your exposure sits.

The direction of travel

AI will reshape how we work. That is not the debate. The question is whether organisations treat that change as a workplace safety obligation, or hope people push through.

ISO 45003 provides the global framework. The EU is working toward a dedicated directive on workplace psychosocial risks. Australia is already enforcing, with SafeWork NSW issuing a prohibition notice that halted a university restructure in 2025, citing serious and imminent risk of psychological harm and a lack of adequate worker consultation. Professionals Australia has demanded urgent meetings with multiple tech companies. Regulators everywhere are building enforcement capacity.

The people who remain in the workplace after redundancies deserve the same structured attention that goes into the severance packages for those who leave.

In this era of significant uncertainty, "she'll be right, mate" does not hold water like it used to.

Disclaimer: This article provides general educational information about workplace psychosocial hazards and occupational health obligations across multiple jurisdictions. It does not constitute legal advice. Organisations should consult qualified legal and occupational health professionals for advice specific to their workplace circumstances and jurisdiction. Data cited is sourced from Safe Work Australia, the World Health Organization, EU-OSHA, Harvard Business School, ISO, peer-reviewed research published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, and relevant regulatory bodies as of the date of publication.