You could feel it
There were rumours. There always are.
Numbers that don’t add up, an acquisition, hiring that quietly stops… You tell yourself it’s odd. You tell yourself you’re imagining things. You say it to two or three people, at the end of a meeting once the others have dropped off.
And then one day, an emergency works council meeting.
So that was it. A PSE, the French formal procedure for collective redundancies.
Two or three days later, the whole company found out in an all-hands. I’d had a two or three day head start on a piece of information I couldn’t yet put into words.
I’m an elected member of the works council. So I was in the room where it would be negotiated.
I’m also the manager of a team that would have to be held together.
And I’m an employee like any other, with a contract, a family, and no idea what was coming.
Three seats. Three different ways of living through the same thing.
The plan
The plan document arrived a bit later.
I don’t know what I was expecting. Something that would explain things clearly, maybe. What I got was a brick. Long, dense, written in a language that isn’t mine.
I spent evenings looking up what the words meant. How does this work? What does this sentence actually mean? I read union sites, law firm sites, legal texts. I learned a vocabulary I could have done without.
Here’s the first thing nobody tells you about being an elected representative during a layoff plan. You get the information before everyone else, and you don’t understand it.
What people asked me
Then the rumours came back. Sharper, more persistent.
“Have you heard they want to cut that whole department?”
“You know that whole line of work is stopping?”
And there I was, with the document.
It’s a fairly uncomfortable place to stand. Being the best informed person in the room, and not being able to say anything, confirm anything, deny anything.
On top of that, the document doesn’t spell things out. Not always. Sometimes you have to read between the lines, cross-reference two sets of figures. I spent a fair amount of time sorting the true from the false. Not to answer anyone, I had no right to answer. Just to understand what was happening inside my own company.
In, out
Then came the job categories, the criteria, the point calculations.
Nothing by name. Never. But you don’t need to be a fortune teller. You look for yourself in the anonymous rows. You count. You redo the maths three times because you’re not sure.
One day I saw myself out. The next day in. The day after that I had no idea.
And on top of it all there was the other question, the one I hadn’t seen coming. Not am I leaving, but do I want to leave.
Some days it looked like a good ending. In France, at least you leave with support. Time ahead of you, enough to turn around, retrain, think. Five years at the company, a door closing cleanly. There are worse things.
The next day, the opposite. A stupid curiosity. I wanted to see what came next. Because let’s be honest, this company had grown too fast. It had got bogged down in process, in slowness, in the inertia of a big organisation it wasn’t. A plan like this one, however brutal, is also supposed to be for that. To get things moving again. I wanted to see.
The two questions kept swinging, never in sync. On the days I saw myself staying, I wanted to leave. On the days I saw myself leaving, I held on.
In between, there was home. Three children, rent, a job market that isn’t what it was a few years ago, even less so when you’re fully remote. That cools the daydreams about elegant exits fairly fast.
My wife listened to me talk for weeks. It was the only place where I could unload, where I could go through all my questions and my anxieties without holding back.
The kids picked up on pieces. Of course they did, that sort of thing carries. One day, in the car, I explained the whole thing to them. What was happening, that I didn’t know whether I was going to lose my job, that this was why I’d been tired lately.
They asked questions. Mostly I tried to reassure them. Somehow, it reassured me too.
Holding on
Meanwhile, there was still a team to run.
A team that knew a layoff plan was under way, that didn’t know who would go, and that had a manager who smiled through every 1:1 without ever letting anything slip. Including with the people I like most. Especially with them, in fact.
I loosened the reins. Deliberately.
I didn’t fight over the sagging velocity. Or the badly estimated tickets. Or the processes we were following more or less, let’s say. As long as the important things were moving, one way or another, I wasn’t going to add pressure to people who didn’t need any.
I think it’s the one management decision from that whole period I’m genuinely proud of. Holding together something that wobbles rather than pushing hard and blowing up mid-flight.
It was shaky, but it didn’t break.
One day
Before the summer, we organised a day all together. In person, in the same room. We’re fully remote, it doesn’t happen often.
We all knew it was the last time as a full team. Nobody dwelled on it.
I was afraid there would be tension. There wasn’t. We talked, we laughed, we discussed everything except that. We even ran two slightly more serious exercises, Lost on the Moon and the one with the spaghetti and the marshmallow. Spoiler: the towers didn’t stand.
It was a very good day.
The org chart
At some point, among the documents, there was a proposed target organisation. Boxes. Anonymous.
I recognised myself immediately.
I already run a decent chunk of things. The marketplace is no small thing, it’s a jungle, really. But my scope widened gradually, over years. I had time to watch it grow. I don’t have every corner of it mastered, but I’ve got the big picture.
There, in the box, there was all of that, plus infra, plus ops, plus IT.
I read it three times.
Impostor syndrome, which I thought I’d filed away somewhere when I became a manager. It came back in XXL. Because this time it isn’t even a question of level. It’s a different job.
And again, questions, nights spent wondering whether that was really it. Heart racing. Yes? No? Yes?
The ghosts
Time passed. Two months of negotiations, then the waiting period for the labour authority to approve the plan.
The official announcement finally came, and it did nothing to me.
I’d known for weeks. I’d had time to go through every emotion and accept it. A bit of relief anyway, maybe.
What did get to me was the rest of the list.
A layoff plan is built to be impartial. Criteria, points, calculations. So there are surprises. People I’d never have imagined leaving. People who were hoping to leave and are staying. No human logic in it at all, and that’s precisely the point.
Then came the last few weeks.
Because people don’t leave on the day of the announcement. They stay. They keep showing up on calls, answering messages, finishing things. Ghosts. Present, not really there any more.
And the ones staying weren’t doing any better. They watched colleagues go, friends in some cases, wondering why them.
The final days were very hard. The goodbye messages, the small gestures, the words you write to someone you’ll probably never see again because you never saw them as anything other than a window.
That’s what I’ll remember. Not the documents.
Today, I’m not quite sure where I stand. Apprehension and excitement. Curiosity and anxiety. I can’t wait to see how it turns out, and I can’t wait for this page to be turned for good.
They say time takes care of the emotional bruises.
To be continued…