> In your opinion what hurts morale more? One big round of layoff, or multiple smaller rounds?

Both hurt morale.

I've seen many rounds of redundancy and layoffs in UK companies and both the huge layoff rounds and the slowly trimming back everywhere.

With the big rounds, the "We'll only do this once so we'll do it big and won't do it again" is never true. The whole company knows it's just time but at least you can prepare.

The axe is on a pendulum and if you give it a lot of momentum and swing from a great height it will swing back in good time and take off another chunk of the company.

With the small rounds of denying there is an issue and trimming a person from each team, it feels like you are being hunted and it's easy to walk around and see that the company isn't doing enough to address whatever the issues are, it's too cautious.

The axe is on a pendulum and if you only swing it a little the cadence is much higher and it will swing often and constantly slice of a little.

The axe is on a pendulum, once it starts swinging it will swing again. It never swings just once.