The email arrived on a Tuesday morning. It was sent by the CEO at 7.45am, before most people had arrived. The subject line read: Important company update. Those three words, in that combination, are always bad news.

The executive board had decided to restructure the marketing and creative departments. Six positions had been identified for redundancy. Staff in those roles were being placed on a thirty-day at-risk period immediately.

Three of the six people were made redundant were people I worked with every day. Marcus from design. Yemi from content. Clare, who had been promoted eighteen months before. The redundancy packages were calculated on years of service. Clare got the most. It still wasn’t enough.

A thirty-day consultation process was offered to each person. The notice period was one month. Severance pay above the statutory minimum had been negotiated by HR. Each person was given a P45 and a settlement agreement to sign.

I was not included in the redundancies. I did not feel lucky. I felt the specific guilt of someone who has been kept when others have not. Marcus cleared his desk in twenty minutes. He didn’t say much. I wrote him a reference that evening. It was the least I could do.

The restructuring was described as necessary for the company’s future. Perhaps it was. But the future that was being built had been paid for entirely by the people who had been let go. That is how restructuring works. The costs are never equally distributed.