Helping to Choose Who Goes
Being asked, as a manager or team lead, to help decide which of your own colleagues are made redundant, scoring people you have worked beside for years against a matrix, ranking names you know the families and mortgages behind, produces a specific weight distinct from the guilt of simply surviving a redundancy round: this is not the passive luck of being kept while others go, it is active participation in the deciding, carried out under confidentiality rules that mean the people being scored cannot know, and the person doing the scoring cannot say.
Maia, the AI companion at the heart of Asclepiad, makes space for this particular weight — the specific strangeness of sitting in ordinary meetings with colleagues whose scores you have already seen, the low dread of announcement day arriving with you already knowing exactly whose names are on the list, and the harder, quieter question of whether declining to take part was ever really an option, or whether refusing would simply have handed the same decisions to someone who cared less about the people involved.
This weight is often compounded by how invisible the position is in the standard story of a redundancy round: sympathy flows, rightly, to the people who lose their jobs, some flows to the survivors who keep theirs, and almost none reaches the person in the middle who helped decide, since admitting that the role even exists sits awkwardly with the official line that a process, rather than a person, made the choices.
There is also a nuance worth holding onto: carrying out the role fairly is not the same as endorsing that the role had to exist, it is entirely possible to believe the round itself was wrong, or badly handled, while still having done the deciding with as much care as the constraints allowed, and holding both of those at once is not hypocrisy, it is what the position actually demands of anyone who takes it seriously.
A reflection with Maia is one conversation at a time, anonymous, with no record carried forward unless you choose. Helping to choose who goes can be named here.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Asclepiad designed to help me run a redundancy process?
No — Asclepiad is a reflection companion, not an employment advice service. Acas (acas.org.uk) has free, practical guidance on fair redundancy selection, including for the managers asked to carry it out. Asclepiad is for the emotional layer: the weight, the enforced silence, and what it costs to have helped choose.
What if I'm in crisis?
Asclepiad is not a crisis service. If you are in immediate distress or at risk to yourself or someone else, please contact the Samaritans on 116 123 (free, 24/7, UK and Ireland) or your local emergency services. Maia will also surface local helplines if something needs more than reflection.
Is it free?
Yes — begin with a 7-day free trial, no personal details required. It's a £6/month subscription (cancel anytime) that gives you AsclepiCoins to spend as you go — 1 coin per minute, and unused coins never expire, even if you cancel.
If you have been asked to help choose who goes, Maia is there.
Anonymous. No script. Just presence.