Afterwards
The week after
Almost everything written for men in your position stops at the conversation. The part nobody prepares you for is the fortnight that follows it, and the year after that.
This is what it looked like from the outside, from twenty years of ringing the people it had been done to.
The relief, and what it is not
It arrives sooner than men expect, often within an hour, and it lands badly. A man who has just ended somebody's employment does not feel entitled to feel better.
It is not coldness and it is not evidence about your character. It is the end of weeks of holding something you could not say, and the body registers that ending whatever you think of it.
What follows the relief is more awkward: a flatness, usually two or three days later, when the thing you organised your attention around for a month is simply over. Men describe going quiet at home in that week without being able to say why.
The building, in the first week
The room you should be watching is not the one you have been dreading. It is the one where the people who stayed are sitting.
They are not, mostly, debating whether the decision was right. They are establishing how it was done, in detail, from the accounts of the people it was done to. Who told them. Whether it was in person. Whether anybody cried. Whether you were there. That account is fixed within about a week and it does not get revised afterwards.
Two things happen almost universally. Work slows for longer than anybody has planned for, because everybody is doing the arithmetic on themselves rather than on the business. And a particular kind of loyalty goes: not to the company, which people are used to being disappointed by, but to you personally, if the account that settled was a bad one.
The other thing men do not anticipate is how quickly they are expected to be normal. There is rarely any acknowledgement that you have just had the worst fortnight of your working life. You are simply back in the diary.
Which calls come, and which never do
Of the people it happened to, roughly three groups formed, and which group a man fell into had very little to do with how good he was at his job.
Some rang within days, usually the ones who had been told early, told the truth, and told by the person who made the decision. They rang for a reference, for a name, for an introduction, and they were often generous about the company. A handful of them ended up recommending the employer that had let them go.
Some went entirely silent towards the company and were perfectly willing to talk to a recruiter about it. That is where the accounts of finding out by calendar invitation, or being told by somebody they had never met, came from. A man who has been managed rather than told will repeat that account to every interviewer he meets for a year, and he is believed, because it is specific.
And some were unreachable in the other direction: they had not told their household the full position, and they were spending the day out of the house. That is the group nobody in the business ever hears about.
What a recruiter actually hears about you
This is the part of the aftermath that is genuinely inside a headhunter's experience rather than anybody else's, so it is worth being exact about it.
Nobody in the market cares that your company made redundancies. It is ordinary, it happens to everybody, and no recruiter has ever thought less of a business for a restructure. What travels is the manner, and it travels through the candidates, not through the company.
In the travel and hospitality world, which is smaller than it looks, a name gets a reputation among the people who left it long before it gets one among the people considering joining. Five or six consistent accounts of a badly handled exit will follow a management name for years, and the man it attaches to is usually unaware of it, because nobody tells him.
The reverse is also true and it is the more useful fact. Men who had been let go decently referred people to the business afterwards. That is not a reward for good behaviour; it is simply what happens when somebody has no grievance to describe.
A year later
For the people it happened to, a year is long enough that the redundancy is rarely the headline of their story any more. Most are working. A number are doing something they would not otherwise have done. A few are not, and that is real and it is not softened here.
For the man who carried it, a year tends to leave one conversation and not the others. It is usually not the one that went worst. There is no obvious reason for which one stays, and it is not a moral ranking of the people involved.
What men said, when asked directly, was that they would not change the decision and would change the week. Almost always the week rather than the decision.
The one thing that moved the account
Across hundreds of those calls, one behaviour separated the accounts that softened over the year from the ones that hardened: whether the man who made the decision remained reachable afterwards.
Not generous, not apologetic, and not available for a negotiation. Reachable. Answering a message. Taking a call three weeks later. Being findable by somebody who wants a name or a reference.
It is a small thing and it is almost entirely within your control, which is more than can be said for most of this.
Observation, not instruction
None of the above is a procedure, a communications plan or a legal position, and none of it tells you what to do in your own business. It is what one recruiter heard, repeatedly, from people on the other end of decisions like yours.
Anything about references, obligations, agreements, notice or what you may and may not say afterwards is a question for an employment lawyer, in your own jurisdiction, on your own facts. It is not a question for this site and the guide here will decline it.
If the week you are actually in is the one before, rather than the one after: the weeks of knowing. If there is nobody to say any of this to, talk it through.