What Nobody Talks After a Restructuring

On 19 May, Finance Minister Nicola Willis announced the NZ public service will cut roughly 8,700 roles by 2029, taking headcount from around 64,000 down to 55,000. $2.4 billion in savings. Agencies merging. AI and digital tools named as part of how the remaining workforce will cope.

The coverage since has been predictable. The PSA calling it reckless. Worried workers. The human cost, which is real and I won't dismiss it.

But this article is for the people who don't lose their jobs.

Post-restructuring is its own kind of hard. And almost nobody talks about it.

I've been through enough restructures to know how this goes. The affected people get the attention, rightfully. HR runs the process. The communications go out. And then, fairly quickly, everyone turns back to the work, except now there are fewer people doing it, and the assumption, unstated but real, is that things will carry on more or less as before, just with more pressure per person.

That assumption is wrong. And acting on it is how you burn out your best remaining people.

The first thing I'd do is stop. Not literally, but mentally. Before you redistribute tasks, before you absorb someone's workload, before you do anything, sit down and ask: what does this team actually need to deliver now?

Not what it was delivering before. Now.

Here's what I've seen in every restructure I've been through: organisations shrink the headcount but keep the workload intact. They split it across fewer people. That's not doing more with less. That's just doing the same with less, and it collapses within a year.

The restructure is, whether you asked for it or not, a forcing function to review everything. Use it.

When I was at the bank, we had a report. Weekly or monthly, I can't recall exactly. Generated by the technology team for a specific person in the CFO's office. A proper report, formatted, tracked, sent on schedule. The kind of thing that takes someone a few hours to pull together each cycle.

We interviewed that person. Asked what they used it for.

They'd never actually looked at it. A safety net, they said. Just in case something came up. When we went back through the history, that something had never come up. Not once.

That report was what I call shelfware. It looked like work, consumed resources, produced nothing. And in every organisation I've worked in, across 30 years, I've found versions of it. Reports, approval chains, coordination meetings, processes left running because stopping them would require someone to make a decision.

The question after a restructure is whether you have the courage to find yours.

The lens I use for this is simple. Which 20% of what your team does actually drives 80% of the outcomes? Find that 20% and protect it. Everything else is a candidate for consolidation, elimination, or redesign.

I won't pretend this is easy. People are attached to their work. Some of what looks like shelfware is someone's entire job identity. Having the honest conversation, directly, without dressing it up as anything other than a resource reality, is probably the hardest part of surviving leadership.

But the alternative is distributing the same furniture across a smaller room and wondering why everyone feels crowded.

Here's what this looked like in practice for me. After a restructure at an education business, the service desk team was down to a handful of people. The old workload, staging and imaging laptops, managing logistics across 45 locations with 80 campuses nationwide, calling couriers, handling returns, would have crushed them if we'd pushed it forward unchanged.

So we redesigned the supply chain. Partnered with the hardware supplier to do the imaging at source. Laptops arrived at users already configured. The courier handled distribution. Returns went directly back to the supplier's offices, of which there were locations nationwide anyway.

The cost per device for the entire arrangement, imaging, logistics, the whole thing, came out around $50. Less than 5% of the laptop price.

The team didn't shrink further. But what they spent their days doing got materially better. They went from robotic, time-consuming logistics to overseeing a mostly automated process and handling the exceptions that actually needed a human brain.

That's the real opportunity inside a restructure, if you're willing to use it. The pressure to reduce forces a review you probably should have done years earlier. Most organisations accumulate work the way houses accumulate furniture, gradually, without realising how much space it takes up.

The question is whether you use the review to redistribute the same furniture, or to actually clear the room.

I've done both. One of them works.