You Survived the Restructure. So what now?
Remember when everyone kept saying (or they were at least thinking), "At least you still have a job"?
Hmm. About that.
You've watched colleagues you've worked alongside for years pack up their desks. You've had those final coffee catch-ups where everyone pretends to be optimistic. You've sat through the announcement of your department's new name (which still doesn't trip off the tongue). The org chart is finalized. The dust has settled.
And yet somehow, you feel as stuck now as you did during the restructure itself.
If this sounds familiar, you're not you're not "failing to move on". You're experiencing something that research has documented extensively but that few really talk about: the messy, complicated, exhausting aftermath of organizational change.
With the view that sometimes having a name for how we are feeling can really help, and more importantly, having some practical strategies for finding your footing again, here are my thoughts.
The Three Things To Know
1. Survivor Guilt Is Real
There is an uncomfortable truth: you might be feeling genuinely relieved that you still have your job and genuinely guilty about that relief. You might feel grateful one moment and resentful the next. You might be questioning whether you even want to stay in a place that treated people this way.
This isn't you being irrational. It's survivor guilt (see Joel Brockner, 1992)[1]. Brockner found that employees who keep their jobs during restructures often experience a toxic combination of guilt for "making it through" and anxiety about being next on the chopping block.
And there’s more!
If the restructure felt unfair. If the process seemed opaque. If decisions appeared arbitrary. If communication was poor. These negative feelings intensify. Your reduced commitment isn't a personal failing. It's a predictable response to witnessing procedural injustice.
So if you're finding it harder to care, harder to go the extra mile, harder to believe in the institutional mission, that makes complete sense.
2. You're Mourning Things That Are Still There (Sort Of)
Your colleague Sarah still sits three desks down. But she's different now - quieter, less engaged, clearly just going through the motions while job hunting. The team meetings still happen, but there’s a quietness about them that wasn’t there before. The work you do feels familiar but somehow... off.
This is what trauma researcher Pauline Boss[2] calls "ambiguous loss". Ambiguous loss is loss without closure. The physical environment might look similar, but the emotional reality has fundamentally shifted. You're mourning not just the people who left, but a version of your workplace - and of yourself - that no longer exists.
For those who work in universities, where so much of our identity is wrapped up in our discipline, or our service, or our sense of institutional mission, this can feel particularly acute. You might find yourself thinking, "This isn't the place I signed up for." You might be wondering, "Who am I in this new structure?"
These are not dramatic thoughts. They're normal responses to real loss. And ambiguous loss is particularly hard to process because there's no clear ending. You're expected to just... carry on.
The first step? Stop fighting the ambivalence. Let yourself hold the contradictory feelings without trying to resolve them immediately.
3. Transitions Take Longer Than Anyone Admits
We all love to believe in clear "before" and "after" states. The restructure happened. Now we're in the new normal. Move along, nothing to see here.
Except that's not how human psychology works.
William Bridges[3] distinguishes change (the external event) and transition (the internal psychological process). Change can happen overnight – though I know restructures do go on for ages and ages (which is hard in itself). But the psychological processes associated with your personal transition can take ever longer.
Bridges identifies three phases:
Ending, Losing, Letting Go – This is where you probably were during the restructure itself. Shock, sadness, anger, disorientation. Lots of people acknowledge this phase.
The Neutral Zone – This is where you might be right now, and it's the phase everyone wants to skip past. It's liminal. Uncertain. Uncomfortable. You're neither here nor there. In our group coaching sessions we name this as the “messy middle” – a time when you feel you can’t move forward or backward and feel that you are going round in circles.[4] And here's what matters: in this zone, it is completely normal to feel less confident, more tired, more emotionally reactive than usual.
It isn’t a personal weakness if you're snapping at people more easily, if you're taking longer to make decisions, if you're feeling foggy or scattered. This is your brain trying to recalibrate in conditions of sustained uncertainty. And honestly, our brains don’t like uncertainty. It is a huge stressor.
New Beginnings – This is where people expect you to be already. But you can't force yourself here. You'll get there when your internal transition catches up to the external change.
All in all then you can find yourself feeling guilty, grieving things that haven't technically ended, and stuck in an uncomfortable transition zone. What to do?
Rebuilding Your Sense of Control and Coherence
The research on occupational psychology is clear: there are two things are essential for wellbeing - job control and role clarity. After a restructure, both are usually in short supply. Here's how to start rebuilding them:
Get explicit about your role boundaries. This isn't the time to be polite and "figure it out as you go." Or a time to be thinking “everyone is busy so I shouldn’t trouble anyone”. Book time with whoever you report to now, not in six months when things have "settled down". Ask direct questions: What are my actual priorities? What decisions can I make independently? What does success look like in this new configuration? Ask anything that is relevant to your role that will enable you to understand the expectations that are being placed on you!
Role ambiguity is one of the strongest predictors of burnout. Don't let your uncertainties fester.
Re-establish routines. You know this but it is still worth saying. Small, predictable anchors matter enormously when everything else feels chaotic. Regular team check-ins. Teaching the module you have developed over several years. A conference you regularly go to or a catch-up with colleagues.
These routines reduce cognitive load and create islands of stability in choppy waters.
Name what has been lost. This one feels counterintuitive as there can be an implicit pressure to be forward-looking. But research on collective sense-making shows that we recover more effectively when we openly acknowledge endings rather than rushing to move on.
Even if you are turning up to the same building and same office every day or logging into your Teams app that has remained exceptionally familiar, create a space to recognize what's changed. It could be a conversation with someone you trust. It could be a formal way of acknowledging specific colleagues who've left. The thing is, the ritual of acknowledging an ending can really help closure on the working world you knew.
Attending to Relationships and Rebuilding Trust
One of the sad, and indeed uncomfortable, truths about restructures is that they can turn previously collegial workplaces into environments of suspicion and guardedness. People become cautious. We interpret decisions through a lens of threat. Who's really on my side? Who's positioning themselves for the next round of cuts?
Amy Edmondson's[5] research on psychological safety shows that teams function and learn best when members feel safe to speak up, admit uncertainty, and ask for help. Restructures demolish psychological safety. Rebuilding it requires deliberate effort:
Normalize emotion at work. This means being willing to say, "I'm finding this transition unsettling" or "I'm still adjusting to how things work now."
Check out Brene Brown’s work on vulnerability[6] because when leaders and colleagues model this kind of honest vulnerability, it reduces stigma and isolation. It gives everyone else permission to be human.
Practice compassionate curiosity. That colleague who seems disengaged? Maybe she's not being difficult. Maybe she's struggling. Instead of assuming resistance, try asking what she's experiencing. "How are you finding the new setup?" can open conversations you didn't know you needed to have.
Empathy is a protective factor against workplace stress and moral injury. But empathy requires getting past our own defensiveness first.
Re-contract your ways of working. New team configurations are a gift in disguise: they're a legitimate reason to have conversations you should have had ages ago. How do we make decisions in this group? What are our communication norms? What are reasonable workload expectations?
Don't assume everyone's on the same page. Be explicit.
Making Sense of Who You Are Now
"What is my value now?"
Identity theory suggests that when a valued role is threatened or altered, we experience drops in self-esteem and motivation. The question isn't whether you'll experience this (you probably will), but how you'll work through it.
Re-articulate your core strengths and values. What aspects of your work give you a sense of purpose, regardless of the structure or the org chart? Maybe it's teaching. Maybe it's research. Maybe it's supporting students or colleagues. Maybe it's problem-solving.
These core values are portable. They survive restructures. Reconnecting with them can help you find meaning even when the external context has shifted.[7]
Seek narrative coherence. Humans are storytelling creatures. We need our lives to make sense as a continuous narrative. Right now, your story might feel disrupted. "I thought I was building toward X, but now I'm doing Y and I don't know how it fits."
Take time to construct a story that links your past, present, and possible future roles.[8] This doesn't mean forcing false optimism. It means finding the thread that connects where you've been to where you might go.
Sometimes just writing it down helps.
Looking After Wellbeing
Restructures are not short, sharp shocks. They're prolonged stressors. And prolonged stress without adequate recovery leads to exhaustion, cynicism, and eventually burnout.
The Job Demands-Resources model[9] shows that high demands combined with reduced resources (like, say, losing half your team) create serious risk unless balanced by support, autonomy, and meaning.
So here's your permission slip:
Pace yourself and prioritize recovery. I can’t say this loudly enough. Protecting your sleep, your breaks, your boundaries is not self-indulgent. It's essential for cognitive functioning and emotional regulation. You cannot think clearly or make good decisions when you're running on fumes.
If you're working longer hours to "prove yourself" or compensate for missing colleagues, please stop. This is not sustainable. You will burn out. And then the university loses someone else - you.
Lean on social support. Connection with colleagues is one of the strongest buffers against work-related stress. This doesn't require grand gestures. Even brief, regular check-ins make a disproportionate difference.
A five-minute coffee. A "how are you actually doing?" message. Lunch with someone who gets it.
Don't isolate yourself.
Access formal support if you need it. Employee assistance programmes, occupational health services, counselling exist for exactly this kind of situation. Academia has a ridiculous culture of stigma around asking for help. Please ignore this culture. Research consistently shows that early support prevents longer-term difficulties.
If you're struggling, get support. You would tell a friend to do the same.
A Final Word
If you're reading this and recognizing yourself, I want you to know: you are are navigating an inherently difficult situation with limited resources and often inadequate institutional support.
The feelings you're experiencing - the guilt, the grief, the exhaustion, the confusion - are not signs of any personal failure. They're signs that you're human. They're signs that you cared about the people who left and the work you were doing together.
The way forward isn't about "getting over it" or "moving on" or "being positive." It's about giving yourself permission to be in the messy middle for as long as you need to be there. It's about rebuilding your sense of purpose and connection one small step at a time. It's about being gentle with yourself while also being honest about what you need.
You survived the restructure. Now give yourself space and time to actually recover from it.
And remember: needing time to adjust is not the same as being unable to adjust. You'll get there. Just not on anyone else's timeline.
with the warmest of wishes,
Christina
Professor Christina Hughes is Founder and CEO of Women-Space Leadership.
[1] Brockner, J (1992) Managing the effects of layoffs on Survivors, California Management Review, 34(2)
[2] Boss, P. (2006). Loss, trauma, and resilience: Therapeutic work with ambiguous loss. W. W. Norton & Company.
[3] Bridges, W (2003) Managing Transitions: Making the most of change, Da Capo Lifelong Books
[4] With thanks to Maria Kukhareva for all her work here
[5] See https://amycedmondson.com/psychological-safety/
[6] See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCvmsMzlF7o
[7] You can take a free StrengthsProfile starter test here if you want to understand your strengths more, https://www.strengthsprofile.com/en-gb/products/free.
[8] See the excellent work of Anna Katharine Schaffner “The Story Solution: Change your toxic self-stories and thrive, https://www.amazon.co.uk/Story-Solution-Change-Self-Stories-Thrive-ebook/dp/B0F499ZRXP
And also Andrew Scott “Shifting Stories: How changing their stories can transform people, https://www.amazon.co.uk/Shifting-Stories-changing-stories-transform/dp/1785893556
[9] See for example Demerouti et al (2001) The job demands-resources model of burnout, Journal of Applied Psychology, 86(3): 499-512, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11419809/