Insights / Hard moments
Facilitating the week after layoffs
The training was on the calendar before the announcement. Now you are standing in front of people who watched colleagues disappear on Thursday.
By McKinley Malbrough III, J.D., MS-HRM. Published September 16, 2026.
Should the session still happen?
Sometimes not, and the most useful thing a facilitator can do is say so. Required compliance training with a deadline, yes. Optional skills development three days after a layoff, usually no.
If you can move it two weeks, move it. A session people cannot absorb is worse than no session, because it teaches them your sessions are indifferent to what is happening.
If it has to happen, how do I start?
Name it in one sentence, say what this session is and is not about, and then do the session. "I know last week was hard. This hour is not about that, and I am not going to pretend it did not happen."
Do not open a processing conversation you are not authorized or prepared to hold. Point to who is holding that, then teach.
What should I cut?
Anything performative. Icebreakers, energy exercises, anything that asks people to be cheerful. Cut the length by a third and protect the part that is genuinely useful.
Keep the close. People in a shaken organization need to see that something concrete came out of the hour.
What if someone gets emotional in the session?
Let it happen without making it the content. Acknowledge it in a sentence, offer to talk after, and move the group forward. Turning the moment into a group discussion exposes a person who did not consent to that.
Follow up individually within the day. That follow-up is the part that matters, and it is the part most facilitators skip.
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