It’s only 9 a.m. and Michelle, a middle manager in a government organization, just received her eighth panicked email from a team member asking about the impending layoffs that were announced yesterday afternoon. People are clearly worried, and Michelle is beginning to feel overwhelmed.
She’s in an unfortunate, yet common, position. She wants to keep people calm and focused, but information comes in drips from leaders above her. The culture she worked so hard to build is becoming flooded with uncertainty. People are scared. What can Michelle do to minimize feelings of threat and help the team keep running smoothly?
Layoffs aren’t the only context in which uncertainty reigns. It shows up wherever there’s rapid change, which research suggests has become the norm within organizations. One study shows that organizational change accelerated by 183% between 2020 and 2024, and by 33% in 2024 alone. In other words, change isn’t just increasing—it’s increasing faster every year.
All this flux makes working life feel much riskier and less stable, as people fear for their livelihoods amid ever-evolving governmental reductions and corporate restructurings. With so much uncertainty in the air, is it any wonder employee engagement hit an 11-year low in 2024? People can’t predict what’s coming next, so they’re checking out entirely.
To help team members perform their essential tasks, leaders must learn to reduce uncertainty, minimize threat, and, ideally, create productive feelings of comfort and safety in an increasingly volatile world.
Provide clarity if you can’t provide certainty
A feeling of certainty isn’t just a nice-to-have. In life and in work, humans crave a sense of predictability about their environment—and we can think of this craving as a genuine psychological need. Thousands of years ago, a need for certainty kept us physically safe, whether from predators or suspicious-looking berries. Our sense of certainty was rewarded with survival.
Today, a need for certainty shows up less in matters of survival and more in being able to predict what’s coming next in our professional, social, and personal lives. That’s why “C” stands for certainty in the NeuroLeadership Institute’s SCARF® Model of social threat and reward: When we can predict certain outcomes in our environment, we feel a sense of reward, which motivates us to take action. When we feel uncertain, however, we tend to feel threatened, which makes us freeze or retreat from the situation. At work, uncertainty leads to impaired judgment and reduced productivity.
If a team faces a large amount of uncertainty, the task for leaders is to manage people’s sense of threat. There are several ways to go about this. In the best-case scenario, a leader in Michelle’s position could immediately send certainty rewards by sharing who’s safe from layoffs and who’s not. This would address the uncertainty head-on, and it would have the side benefit of minimizing the spread of office rumors, which only amplifies the uncertainty.
Even delivering bad news to the people who are getting laid off will send a small reward signal, as research shows uncertainty tends to feel worse than the bad news itself. One study, for example, showed people experienced more dread about the possibility of a small electric shock than people who knew for certain a shock was coming. Uncertainty is that uncomfortable.
And yet, providing certainty isn’t always feasible. A leader won’t necessarily have all the answers right when employees need them most. Sometimes, a leader can only share some of what they know, or they might not know anything at all. Here, neuroscience suggests the best practice is to share what you do know and what you don’t, both in terms of information as well as the ongoing process.
Michelle, for example, might be able to share that while other departments have received the news of who’s being laid off, she’s still waiting on her supervisor to tell her. She might also share that the list of names is supposed to be shared with her in the next couple weeks, giving team members a window into the process.
While not as rewarding as certainty, this sense of clarity sets people’s expectations, which creates a calming sense of predictability in the brain. Clarity is best offered in a three-pronged approach: making timelines explicit, taking unlikely outcomes off the table, and reminding employees about the organization’s key values, as a way to recommit to a higher purpose and shared vision.
In practice, clarity acts as a helpful substitute for certainty. For instance, even if people don’t know if they’ll have a job next month, having the clarity they’ll find out in two weeks is easier to deal with than waking up each day wondering if today’s the day. That’s the wisdom of offering clarity when certainty is in short supply: When people know what to expect, they feel more oriented and secure in the situation, putting their minds at ease.
Offset the threat by reassuring in other areas
Providing clarity about information and processes isn’t the only tool available to leaders dealing with uncertainty. They can also work to boost people’s sense of reward in the other four SCARF® domains: status, a feeling of prestige within the group; autonomy, a sense of control over our environment; relatedness, a feeling of belonging and connection to the group; and fairness, a sense of just and equal treatment within the group.
Sending these reward signals creates what’s known as an “offsetting effect.” If one domain is threatened, we can compensate—or offset it—by amplifying feelings of reward in the other domains. That said, offsetting effects won’t make everything better, especially against very strong threats. But they can soften the blow. For example, here’s how Michelle could offset a certainty threat through the other four SCARF® domains in an all-hands meeting about the layoffs:
Status: Michelle emphasizes that the layoffs have nothing to do with people’s individual performance—they are purely a cost-cutting measure.
Autonomy: Prior to the meeting, Michelle asks people to submit questions via an anonymous form. She sorts the questions and answers a handful during the meeting.
Relatedness: Michelle announces a partnership she’s leading with HR to help outgoing employees with résumé coaching and finding their next job.
Fairness: Michelle explains how the process of creating severance packages was based on a standard rubric across all employees, based on their tenure with the company.
Again, none of these efforts will make the pain of losing their job any easier for employees to bear. The goal with offsetting is to reduce the pain brought on by the uncertainty of the situation. A leader might not be able to save an employee from getting laid off, but they can at least make the process of waiting feel more dignified, less isolating, and, hopefully, less threatening.
Finding a balance
In a rapidly changing work environment, including public-sector downsizing, uncertainty becomes a default state of mind. It becomes the air people breathe. But the constant vigilance needed to cope with uncertainty is exhausting. So unless leaders can replace uncertainty with certainty, their responsibility falls to offering clarity whenever possible, as well as boosting other SCARF® signals to offset people’s negative feelings.
Otherwise, one thing that is certain is employees will struggle to be effective at their jobs. They’ll spend enormous amounts of cognitive energy resolving the feelings of threat, leaving them feeling drained and slow to respond to work’s many challenges, rather than being energized and proactive. This is also a drain on the organization as it struggles to maintain a high level of performance.
However, when employees feel those rewarding signals being sent, despite how painful a situation may be, they’re much more likely to navigate uncertainty with a calm and focused mind. For creatures highly sensitive to social threat, that serenity counts for a lot.