Dive Brief:
- Worker anxiety about layoffs is rapidly increasing, hitting middle managers the hardest, according to a recent survey by Perceptyx. In March, 35% of employees worried about layoffs, up from 30% in February, while 45% of middle managers say they’re at least moderately worried, compared with 26% of individual contributors.
- Poor communication may be a factor, Perceptyx noted in an April 23 blog. Only 54% of the more than 5,400 U.S. employees surveyed in February and March said their organization communicated openly about layoffs. But 53% said they don’t understand why layoffs happened at all.
- “In many ways, the numbers in this study look like ones we’ve seen in other recent downturns, except this time, anxiety is more concentrated in the middle,” Emily Killham, senior director and head of Perceptyx’s Center for Workforce Transformation, stated in the blog.
Dive Insight:
It’s a tough time to be a middle manager, Killham emphasized. People leaders “find themselves knowing too much and too little. They hear official information from the senior team before everyone else, and absorb every scary rumor across the company,” she said.
“It’s no wonder they feel stressed and insecure,” Killham added.
The anxiety signals an even deeper issue: Middle managers “score lower than their colleagues across multiple measures of engagement and well-being,” she pointed out.
Studies, like the Gallup report released last week, confirm manager engagement is in trouble.
While the global percentage of engaged employees fell to 21% in 2024, of these, managers suffered the steepest decline, Gallup found.
Anxiety about layoffs isn’t likely to abate any time soon. Forty-five percent of U.S. managers predicted their company will likely lay off workers this year, according to a January report from ResumeTemplates.com.
The Perceptyx survey found that 17% of employees said they’ve been personally laid off in the past three months; 21% reported layoffs in their department; and 24% said their organization had laid people off.
Dealing with a layoff can be tricky because staff often don’t know how decisions regarding who will be laid off are made, a ResumeTemplates executive indicated.
Quality communication may help, especially for the employees who remain, Perceptyx found. More than 6 in 10 employees who said their organization communicated openly about layoffs reported high levels of engagement, three times the level of employees who didn’t receive open communication, the platform noted.
For organizations to maintain trust with their employees, “they need to be proactive, honest and empathetic in their communications, invest in career development and give employees a way to make their voices heard,” Killham said.
