Mutual Aid Isn't Just a Crisis Response. It's a Design Principle.
Every time I've been part of managing a reduction in force, I get the same question. It's never from someone trying to cause trouble. It's usually a manager, or a close colleague of the people being let go, and the question is always some version of: can we have the list of names?
I've watched other comms, legal, and HR people flinch at that exact question enough times to know the reaction isn't just mine. Something close to an antibody response fires the moment those words land, because we already know what has to happen next. The answer, legally and ethically, in most cases, is no. Sharing a list of the people affected by a layoff creates real exposure: privacy obligations, discrimination risk, the basic dignity of people who did not choose to have their job loss become a distributed document. The no is correct almost every time you hear it.
But the need behind the question is just as real. People are not asking for the list out of curiosity. They're asking because they want to help the people who were let go find their next role, and they know that help works faster and better when it's organized. So the network builds itself anyway. Within a day, a spreadsheet appears that nobody official built. Names, roles, LinkedIn links, sometimes a column for what people are looking for next. It moves through a group chat that formed within the hour, and by the end of the week it has done more for the people affected than the official severance packet did.
This happens almost every time there's a hard change, not because anyone trained people to do it, but because people already know how to take care of each other when the formal system, for good reason, can't.
What the network gets right that the program doesn't
Most organizations treat this as background noise, something that happens on channels IT didn't set up, among people leadership isn't part of. That's a mistake. The network that forms on its own is a working demonstration of what people actually need, built faster and more precisely than anything designed in advance.
A severance package answers a transactional question. A peer network answers a different one: who else is going through this, and how do we get each other through it. Those aren't competing forms of support, they're different categories of need, and most companies only design for the first one. The informal network also adapts in real time in a way official programs rarely do. It reorganizes around whoever needs the most help that week, hears about openings before a job board does, and updates itself without anyone asking it to.
Where the real constraint sits
None of this argues for unmanaged risk, and the list of names is only one example. Cutting off systems access the day a layoff takes effect is often the right call too. In regulated industries especially, departing employees may hold proprietary research, confidential data, or information covered by obligations that don't end when employment does. Legal, security, and HR teams weighing that exposure aren't manufacturing an obstacle. They're doing their job, and a leader who overrides that in the name of preserving connection is making a different kind of mistake.
The distinction worth holding is between what's actually restricted and what just gets swept up in the same reflex. Withholding a roster of affected employees is a real constraint. Revoking a login on day one is a real constraint. Whether former colleagues can still text, email, or connect on LinkedIn is not the same kind of decision at all, and organizations sometimes restrict all three the same way, as if refusing one required refusing them all. It doesn't. A company can hold every legitimate line, protect the list, lock the systems, and still leave room for the human network to survive the transition.
The question leadership actually needs to answer
Not every barrier deserves to fall, and not every barrier deserves to stand. If a list can't be shared or a login has to close immediately, that's a defensible constraint, and it's worth explaining as one so people understand the no isn't indifference. If former employees are discouraged from staying in touch with current ones, or alumni relationships get treated as a liability instead of an asset, that's a choice with no legal or security rationale behind it, and it deserves to be named as a choice rather than a policy.
The people going through a change already know how to help each other survive it. Leadership's job isn't to build that instinct from scratch or to remove every obstacle in its path. It's to be honest about which barriers are protecting something real, and which ones are just protecting discomfort with a network the company was never going to control anyway.
