If you kept your job through a layoff and feel worse rather than relieved, you are in good company, and it does not mean you are ungrateful or failing to cope. A 2025 survey of 1,064 full-time US workers who had been through at least one company layoff found that 61% reported more work immediately afterwards, and 65% said a lack of training led to a costly mistake or left them unprepared or hesitant to act. Kahoot!'s CEO put it this way: "Surviving a layoff doesn't mean surviving the impact." Read through the A.C.E. model, the strain is not a personal weakness. It is what happens when the work, the conditions and the unspoken feelings all change at once and only one of them gets talked about.
A word of care first. Kahoot! sells learning software and commissioned the survey, so the findings sit close to its commercial interest in training. The data is self-reported, limited to US workers, collected in April and May 2025, and describes people who had experienced a layoff at their company in the past three years, which is not the same as people who are still dealing with one today. It tells us how respondents say it felt, not what caused it. We have used it because the experience it describes is common and rarely written about, not because it settles the question.
That the workload goes up and the support does not. In the Kahoot! survey, 61% of respondents said their workload increased immediately after the layoffs, 63% by the end of the first week and 60% a month later. 42% said they were frequently or constantly given tasks outside their expertise without training. 84% spent time during the working week teaching themselves new responsibilities, and one in four spent more than four hours a week doing so.
Only 27% received structured training or orientation for the new work, while 70% said a structured re-onboarding programme would have made the transition easier. 55% relied on colleagues to learn, 44% on trial and error. The release also reports that 60% of senior executives were more likely to receive structured onboarding for new tasks, against 20% of individual contributors.
On how it felt, 49% reported a drop in morale and engagement. 54% were comfortable asking leadership for help or training, which means 46% were not, and 18% of the whole group said they worried about appearing incompetent if they asked. Among Gen Z respondents, 77% reported a costly mistake or felt unprepared, and 72% had considered leaving because of the pressure and limited support.
Because the situation asks you to carry more while leaving little room to say how you feel about it. This is our reading, not a finding of the survey. The survey measures workload, training and morale. It does not measure guilt, grief for colleagues or anxiety that you might be next, and we would be inventing if we claimed it did. But feelings like these are plausible companions to the strain the survey does measure, and they may help explain why a job kept can still feel like a loss.
Relief assumes the threat has passed. For many survivors it has not, because the remaining work is bigger, the rules are unclear and the people who knew how things worked have gone. In the survey, 48% said global and economic tension made things worse, so the uncertainty was not only inside the company.
We have written before about the quiet version of this feeling in why staying is not the same as buying in and about the loneliness that can sit inside a full office in being surrounded by colleagues and still feeling alone. Layoffs can bring both to the surface at once.
As three separate things going on at once, and only one of them is about you. AQ, or Adaptability Quotient, is described in the A.C.E. model across three dimensions: Ability (how, and to what degree, you adapt), Character (who adapts and why) and Environment (when, and to what degree, the conditions let you adapt).
Mental Flexibility is the ability to look at a situation and create new pathways. Unlearn is the ability to deliberately let go of outdated information, beliefs and practices. After a layoff, the job you had no longer exists in the form you knew, and some of what you did before may no longer apply. Unlearn asks what you can let go of, and Mental Flexibility asks what a workable new route looks like. The survey suggests most people did this on their own, in working hours, through colleagues and trial and error. That is a lot of adapting to do alone, and it says something about the conditions rather than about how capable people are.
Character is about preference and position, and its sub-dimensions are spectrums, so there is no right place to be. Motivation Style runs from "play to protect" to "play to win". Someone nearer the "play to protect" end may keep their head down and avoid asking for help, because asking can feel like a risk when jobs have just gone. Someone nearer "play to win" may take on every new task to prove their worth. Neither is wrong, and both can end up exhausted. Hope is the mindset to pursue goals and create alternative routes when challenged. After a layoff it is worth asking what, specifically, you are hoping for, and whether that is something you can still reach from here.
Environment describes the conditions, not the person, and here the survey is most striking. Only 27% received structured training, 54% felt comfortable asking for help and senior executives were more likely than individual contributors to receive structured onboarding (60% against 20%, as the release reports). In AQ terms that points to Team Support, which is about how comfortable people feel sharing knowledge and expressing opinions, and Work Environment, which is about the systems and processes that influence how much people can experiment and try things. Work Stress runs in reverse in the AQ model, so a higher reading is the adverse end, and a sudden jump in workload is exactly the condition that pushes it that way. When the conditions leave people to figure it out alone, the strain is a feature of the environment, not a flaw in the person.
Start by naming what has changed, then ask for one specific thing. These are practical suggestions drawn from the A.C.E. model, not findings from the Kahoot! survey.
That a layoff does not end with the announcement. If the survey is a fair picture, the weeks after are when workload rises, training is thin and the people with the least structure are those lower down. Three Environment questions are worth asking: has anyone said plainly what each person now owns, is there a structured way to learn the new work, and is it safe to say "I do not know how to do this"? We looked at how the manager's side of this plays out in why manager engagement is falling. An AQme assessment is one way to open a more specific conversation about how people on a team tend to adapt and which conditions help or block them. It describes tendencies and conditions. It does not measure workload, morale or risk to any role.
In a 2025 Kahoot! survey of 1,064 US workers who had been through at least one company layoff, 61% reported more work immediately afterwards, 49% reported lower morale and engagement, and 65% felt unprepared or made a costly mistake due to lack of training. The survey is self-reported and vendor-commissioned, and it does not measure guilt or anxiety directly.
The Kahoot! survey did not measure guilt or fear of being next, so it cannot say how common those feelings are. What it does show is that many survivors faced more work, little structured training and low morale. A mixed reaction to a hard event does not mean something is wrong with you.
It treats it as three questions. Ability covers how you learn the new work, including Unlearn (letting go of outdated practices) and Mental Flexibility (creating new pathways). Character covers your preferences and position on spectrums such as Motivation Style and Hope. Environment covers whether the conditions, including Team Support, Work Environment and Work Stress, let you adapt. An AQ profile describes how a person tends to adapt. It does not measure workload or wellbeing.
Ask for something specific and small, such as an hour to walk through a process. In the survey, 18% of respondents said they worried about appearing incompetent if they asked, so the concern is common. A specific request signals ownership, not weakness.
Say plainly what each person now owns, offer a structured way to learn the new work, and make it safe to say "I do not know how". A team conversation based on an AQme assessment can add detail about how people tend to adapt and which conditions help or block them.
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