Two emails arrive in the same week. Monday brings the invitation to an all-hands on the company's renewed commitment to its people. Thursday brings a calendar hold with no title and no agenda, which everyone in the company has learned to read correctly. By Friday the values on the wall have become a private joke, not because the values are wrong, but because everyone just watched them lose to a spreadsheet.

By the numbers, 2025 was one of the hardest years for white-collar work in a generation, with more than 1.1 million announced U.S. layoffs through November, up over 50% on the year before. The shape of the cutting may matter more than the scale. The single dramatic layoff has given way to the rolling layoff, a permanent low-grade drip that keeps everyone scanning for the next round. Glassdoor reviewers now mention job insecurity more often than they did at the start of the pandemic, and employees increasingly reach for words like misaligned and hypocritical when describing their leadership.

The mechanic underneath this is simple, and uncomfortable for anyone running a culture program. Culture is not a set of values. It is the evidence your people have accumulated, over years, about whether leadership's words and actions match. It works like a ledger, and a badly handled layoff writes a permanent entry into it. Most are handled badly; in one study, more than half of employees at companies that cut did not even understand why the cut happened. Leave that vacuum and people will fill it with the worst available story, then adjust their loyalty to fit. They will still attend the workshop. They will simply conclude that the workshop and the real company are separate things, and decide how much of themselves to bring to work accordingly.

None of this argues that you can never cut. Sometimes the business genuinely requires it. It argues that you cannot claim culture as your top priority while treating your people as the first variable you sacrifice when the number wobbles, because everyone in the building can see which of those two commitments is load-bearing.

What separates the companies that keep trust through a hard cut is almost embarrassingly plain. They tell the honest truth about why it is happening. They protect the dignity of the people leaving, in full view of the people staying. And they have the judgment not to launch a belonging campaign in the same week they shrank the team. Declining to insult your people's intelligence turns out to be a more powerful culture intervention than any off-site.

So the practical question for a leadership team is not whether the values are well written. It is what your people learned about those values the last time the company had a genuinely bad week. Anyone can live their values in a good quarter, and the ones that survive a bad one are the only ones you actually have. If a restructuring is coming, plan the honesty with the same rigor you plan the numbers. Your culture for the next three years will be set in that week, not in the workshop that follows it.

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Performance First is a KOhesion series on why culture work broke and what to build instead.