Add Silicon Canals to your Google News feed. 
The press releases tell one story. Series B closed. Revenue doubled. Headcount ‘optimised.’ But inside the Slack channels and one-on-ones at Europe’s fastest-growing scale-ups, a different narrative is unfolding — one that rarely makes it into funding announcements.
The people who survived the layoffs are not okay.
The paradox of survivor productivity
When a European scale-up cuts 20% of its workforce and then posts record quarterly growth, the board sees validation. The remaining team sees a mandate: do more, say less, and be grateful you still have a job. This dynamic has a name in organisational psychology — survivor syndrome — and it’s been studied since the 1990s. But the current wave feels different, because it’s happening inside companies that still publicly brand themselves as mission-driven, people-first workplaces.
A Gallup study found that employees who remain after layoffs experience a 41% decline in job satisfaction and a 20% decline in job performance. That’s not a minor dip. That’s a structural drag on exactly the growth these cuts were supposed to protect.
What makes the European scale-up space particularly vulnerable is the cultural overlay. Many of these companies were founded on explicit values around well-being, flexibility, and transparency. When those same companies execute layoffs with corporate-sanitised language and then expect survivors to absorb the workload of departed colleagues without acknowledgment, the psychological contract doesn’t just bend — it snaps.
The brain under chronic overload
There’s a neurological dimension to this that rarely enters the boardroom conversation. When someone watches colleagues get laid off and then inherits their responsibilities, the brain doesn’t simply ‘adapt.’ It enters a prolonged state of threat detection. Cortisol stays elevated. The prefrontal cortex — the part of the brain responsible for strategic thinking, creativity, and decision-making — gets progressively hijacked by the amygdala’s survival responses.
In practical terms, this means the people you’re counting on to innovate and execute are operating with diminished cognitive capacity. A study published in the journal Scientific Reports showed that chronic workplace stress physically reduces grey matter volume in brain regions associated with emotional regulation and complex reasoning. The irony is brutal: the very cuts designed to make the company leaner are making the remaining team cognitively slower.
And yet, in many European scale-ups, the survivors are still hitting their numbers — at least for now. They’re running on adrenaline, fear, and a labour market that, despite recent cooling, still doesn’t feel safe enough to leave. This creates the illusion of resilience when what’s actually happening is depletion.
The silence problem
One of the most corrosive dynamics inside post-layoff scale-ups is the enforced optimism. Leadership wants to ‘move forward.’ HR schedules town halls that acknowledge the changes but pivot quickly to opportunity. Managers, themselves often overwhelmed, default to checking in on deliverables rather than emotional states.
The result is a culture where burnout becomes invisible — not because it isn’t there, but because nobody has permission to name it. A study by the World Health Organisation, which formally classified burnout as an occupational phenomenon, emphasises that it’s driven not just by workload but by a perceived lack of control and recognition. Survivors who watched their peers get cut — often with little warning — are experiencing all three drivers simultaneously.
This is especially pronounced at scale-ups where stock options and equity form a meaningful part of compensation. The implicit message is clear: your stock is worth something only if we keep growing, so keep pushing. The golden handcuffs tighten precisely when the psychological cost of wearing them increases. It creates a trade-off that many employees are making unconsciously — trading long-term health for the possibility of a future liquidity event.
What European scale-ups can actually do
The uncomfortable truth is that most post-layoff ‘support’ is performative. An extra month of therapy sessions through an EAP, a meditation app subscription — these gestures address symptoms while ignoring the systemic cause. The real intervention is structural.
First, workload redistribution needs to be honest. If a team of ten becomes a team of seven, the scope of work needs to shrink proportionally — or new hires need to come in fast. Expecting seven people to absorb the output of ten while calling it ‘efficiency’ is a trade in borrowed time.
Second, leadership needs to create genuine space for grief and frustration. Not a single all-hands meeting, but an ongoing culture where it’s safe to say, ‘I’m struggling with the pace since the restructure.’ This isn’t soft management — it’s the only way to maintain accurate signal on team capacity.
Third, managers need training in recognising the specific patterns of survivor syndrome. Most scale-up managers are promoted for technical excellence, not psychological literacy. They’re watching for performance drops when they should be watching for performance maintenance at unsustainable cost — the person who’s still delivering but has gone quiet in meetings, stopped proposing new ideas, or started declining optional interactions.
The growth numbers won’t tell you
Here’s what makes this pattern so dangerous: by the time survivor burnout shows up in the metrics — attrition spikes, quality drops, innovation stalls — the damage is already baked in. The lag between psychological depletion and measurable performance decline can be six to eighteen months, according to research from the Harvard Business Review. That means the record growth a scale-up is celebrating today might be running on fumes that will be visible in next year’s numbers.
European tech has entered a phase where capital efficiency is king and headcount discipline is rewarded by investors. That’s not inherently wrong. But there’s a meaningful difference between building a lean company and hollowing out the people who remain. The former is strategy. The latter is extraction dressed as discipline.
The scale-ups that will sustain their growth trajectories through 2025 and beyond aren’t the ones with the most aggressive cost cuts. They’re the ones that understand a basic but frequently ignored truth: you can’t optimise your way to greatness on the backs of people who are quietly falling apart.
Feature image by Nataliya Vaitkevich on Pexels
