The True Cost of Savings
- Debbie Braden
- Jul 6
- 2 min read
U.S. employers announced just over 45,000 job cuts in June. For the first half of 2026, that puts the total job losses as the second highest since 2020. (1) While some companies site AI, others are cutting due to shifting priorities and even as acquisition preparation impacting management, corporate, operations, and front-line employees alike.
Every one of those cuts solved something for the company—a margin problem, a headcount target, a board expectation.
Each cut also made a trade—short term gain for long-term trust. Two sides of a coin—a positive balance sheet on one side, a cost nobody is tracking on the other.
Shawn Achor calls this erosion The Great Drift. In his new book, The Power of Belief, he names seven core beliefs that break down as people lose the steady ground underneath them—steady work, steady community, steady belonging.
Three of these beliefs show up in every organization I listen to: my behavior matters, I have something to give, and this work is meaningful.
What the positive P&L doesn’t show is that when beliefs break, turnover reads as a retention problem. Slow adoption reads as a training gap. Quiet disengagement reads as a performance issue. Leadership fixes the symptom, but the belief stays broken.
Meta, famous for its leadership style of “disagree and commit or leave” is feeling the backlash of their hard-charging management style of mass layoffs, performance-based tracking, and keystroke tracking with Zuckerberg himself admitting the company made mistakes. (2) The irony is that over 2,000 layoffs were still working their way out the door in California through July—even as leadership was owning the damage. (3)
Layoffs solve today’s numbers, but they also leave a residue that outlasts the transaction. The people who stay carry with them questions about what their time and loyalty really means, if anything. The people who leave carry with them into the next interview, the next onboarding, and the next team they join—baggage other managers and companies have to mitigate.
This is the space where I work. The space in between what leadership intends and employees experience. Leadership expects a period of unease. But once the normal business rhythm returns, they assume the dust has settled. It hasn't. People are quietly sending out resumes, giving less discretionary effort, questioning the company in hallways and at home—ripples still moving under a calm surface.
Every employee is shaped by their experiences. Those experiences create beliefs that compound into behaviors. Good experiences translate into good behaviors. The reverse is also true.
Great Place to Work CEO, Michael Bush said, “Listening isn’t something you do once in a while. At these companies, it’s constant—and it leads to action and a stronger business.” Companies where all voices are heard experience 5.5 times the revenue growth of less innovative companies. (4)
Makes me wonder—what could stability and trust savings become in lieu of today’s EBITDA margin expansion.
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