Every restructure I have been part of, whether it involved 8 people or 800, moved through the same basic logic. The specific roles, the timelines, the announcement language, those were all different. But the questions underneath the process were consistent.
These are not official HR frameworks with trademarked names. They are the questions that actually get asked in the room when a department head and an HR business partner are going through a list of roles. I have been that HR business partner. I have been in those conversations. This is what they sound like.
The three questions
Could this work be done without this person?
Not "is this person good at their job." Not "would we miss them." Could the work, specifically, be redistributed, automated, or eliminated? This is the replaceability question. It is the first filter. If the answer is yes with reasonable effort, the role enters the evaluation list regardless of individual performance.
What is the consequence of removing this role for the next 90 days?
Not for years out. Not in theory. In the next 90 days, what breaks, who feels it, and how visible is that pain to leadership? This is the consequence question. Roles whose absence would be invisible, internal, or distributed across existing teams are at high risk. Roles whose absence would be felt by external stakeholders or revenue owners are at low risk.
Would this person be difficult to replace if we needed to hire back in 18 months?
This is the optionality question. It cuts both ways. If the answer is "no, we could hire someone for this in 30 days," the role is a cut candidate. If the answer is "yes, this person carries institutional knowledge we would struggle to rebuild," it is a protection factor. This question is also where personal relationships, visibility, and organizational reputation actually matter.
What these questions mean for your role
Most workers assume that performance reviews and restructures are evaluated on the same logic. They are not. A performance review asks: how well is this person doing the job? A restructure asks: should this job exist? Those are fundamentally different questions and they require different kinds of preparation.
The workers who survive restructures consistently are not always the highest performers. They are the ones who have answered these three questions favorably in the minds of the people making the decision, often without those people being consciously aware of it.
"A performance review asks how well you do the job. A restructure asks whether the job should exist."
How to move the answers in your favor
On replaceability
The goal is not to make yourself irreplaceable in a dramatic way. That is neither realistic nor sustainable. The goal is to ensure that the work you do is not so generic that it could obviously be automated or redistributed without disruption. The move is to specialize toward judgment-intensive tasks: decisions, relationships, context that requires institutional knowledge. Anything that is primarily sequencing, aggregating, or processing data is high risk.
On consequence
Make the consequence of your absence visible to people with authority. This is not about being loud or political. It is about ensuring that at least one senior person could articulate why your absence would matter, without having to look it up. If your impact is entirely internal and invisible above your direct manager, you are running a structural risk regardless of how good your work is.
On optionality
Document institutional knowledge. Own relationships that would be painful to hand over. Operate in areas where the learning curve for a replacement would be genuinely steep. These are the things that make the 18-month question point toward protecting your role rather than cutting it.
The question nobody asks
After the three questions, there is sometimes a fourth. It is not official. It does not appear on any framework. But it surfaces in rooms where people are going through lists and the numbers are not adding up to the target reduction.
The fourth question is: who on this list would we genuinely regret losing?
That question is answered almost entirely by reputation and visibility. You cannot build it in 30 days. But you can start building it the moment you understand it exists.
The assessment on this site measures several of these factors directly. If you have not taken it yet, that is the logical next step. Not because a score tells you everything, but because knowing where you stand on these three questions is the foundation for everything that comes after.