Unbossing it
Bonfire of the middle managers
Why firms are “delayering”
Illustration of a businessman with multiple layers of heads peeling open like an onion with a regular head in the middle
delayer
to reduce the number of different levels of staff in a company or organization:
eg. In his letter to shareholders he said he plans to delayer management in order to speed decision-making.
eg. Delayering may be the best chance to rescue the industry from profitless wilderness.
MIDDLE MANAGERS never have it easy. Subordinates resent them for climbing the corporate ladder. The top brass blame them when company strategy fails. In the popular mind they personify corporate bloat; they are the stuff of satire rather than respect. Stress and burn-out are their lot.(In societal views, they represent corporate overindulgence, epitomise corporate inflation; they are regarded as figures of satire instead of reverence. Stress and burnout characterise their existence. Stress and exhaustion are their common fate.)
,top 'brass
(informal) the people who are in the most important positions in a company, an organization, etc.
eg. All the top brass was / were at the ceremony.
eg. Peddle loved the Apple II, and he arranged a presentation for his top brass a few weeks later at Commodore headquarters.
lot
LUCK / SITUATION
5. [sing.] a person's luck or situation in life
SYN is destiny
eg. She was feeling dissatisfied with her lot.
But lately they have had an especially hard time. Lots of them are losing their jobs. In August Google said it had cut 35% of its managers overseeing teams of fewer than three. In September Fiverr, a freelancing marketplace, said it would shed managers to focus more on artificial intelligence (AI). Amazon has been trimming all year in its effort to improve efficiency—most recently in July, at its cloud-computing arm. Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg has been complaining about “managers managing managers” since 2023.
And that’s just in tech. So far this year phrases relating to “reducing management layers” have been mentioned 98 times on the earning calls of companies in S&P’s global stockmarket index, twice as often as in the whole of 2022. The list includes UBS, a Swiss bank; Reckitt Benckiser, a British consumer-goods company; and Air Liquide, a French maker of industrial gases. What is behind this bout of “unbossing”?
One explanation is simply that in an uncertain economic environment, companies are cutting costs. Surveys of executives (for example, by the Atlanta Fed and the Bank of England) suggest that many of them plan to lower hiring overall and invest less. Among other causes, they are struggling to fathom D’s ever-changing tariff regime.
Another reason has its roots in the pandemic. When covid-19 first struck, companies furloughed /'fɝlo/ staff. That was followed by a hiring spree as firms, particularly in tech, raced to meet demand for e-commerce and digital services. New managers were needed to supervise the new staff. At the same time, firms were overpromoting people. In a bid to hold on to good employees, companies gave them management positions, even if they were in charge of only one or two subordinates, notes Bryan Hancock of McKinsey, a consultancy. Managers’ ranks swelled. America’s Bureau of Labour Statistics tracks 425 broad categories of occupation. Between 2019 and 2024 five of the ten fastest-growing were management roles.
Now companies are shedding the excess. Figures from Live Data Technologies, a research firm, show that since November 2022, when the covid hiring-binge peaked, listed American firms have cut middle-management positions by around 3% on average. Numbers of non-managerial staff have fallen similarly. But tech and health-care companies, which stepped up hiring during the pandemic, have cut middle managers faster than they have cut other staff. Other sectors struck hard by covid, such as retail, have shed a large share of the rank and file as well as their supervisors.
What about the supposed new job-eater, AI? Plenty of firms, including Amazon and Walmart, are both talking up their use of the technology and firing managers. But the cull seems to have little connection to ChatGPT. The Economist compared Live Data Technologies’ headcount figures by sector with data from the Business Trends and Outlook Survey, a poll by the Census Bureau, an American government agency. The poll asks firms, among other things, whether they have used AI in the past two weeks. The analysis did not reveal any relationship between AI use and delayering.
job-eater
A "job-eater" is something (often technology, automation, or processes) that reduces or eliminates the need for human workers in specific roles.
eg. Self-checkout kiosks /'kiɑsk/ in supermarkets are a classic job-eater. They have replaced many traditional cashier positions, as customers can now scan and pay for their items without a human employee’s assistance. This reduces the number of cashiers a store needs to hire and schedule.
eg. Industrial robotic arms in the manufacturing sector are a major job-eater, which significantly reduces employment opportunities. They handle and perform repetitive, precise tasks such as welding automotive parts and components, assembling electronics, or packaging goods—work that was previously carried out by human assembly line workers. Nowadays, factories rely on these robots to work 24/7 and operate continuously without fatigue, thereby cutting the need for large teams of manual labourers, diminishing the requirement for extensive teams.
eg. AI-driven medical coding technologies in the healthcare world serve as job-eaters for human medical coders. These systems autonomously evaluate physicians' notes, diagnostic results, and patient documentation to allocate the appropriate billing codes— a task that previously necessitated coders to manually examine and interpret medical information. The AI-Powered systems operate more swiftly and with greater accuracy, thereby decreasing the demand for human coders in hospitals or insurance firms.
cull /kʌl/
to kill a particular number of animals of a group in order to prevent the group from getting too large
eg. They cull a significant number of them.
eg. From frontier days its labour laws have given employers leave to cull jobs almost at will.
▪ 'cull sth from sth
to choose or collect sth from a source or several different sources
eg. an exhibition of paintings culled from regional art galleries
eg. The editor will cull the best articles from the submissions for the magazine.
eg. The director decided to cull a few scenes from the movie to make it shorter.
That may eventually change. For a long time technology has been taking over some management tasks, from disseminating information to monitoring workers. According to a survey by McKinsey, managers spend about a quarter of their time on administrative tasks. These too seem open to disruption.
disseminate
(formal) to spread information, knowledge, etc. so that it reaches many people
eg. Their findings have been widely disseminated.
But in the interim AI may be the middle manager’s friend. Raffaella Sadun of Harvard Business School notes that effective middle managers can boost the uptake of corporate training, notably at companies trying to persuade staff to use the new technology. If companies want workers to swot up on AI, they may be well advised to hold on to their middle managers for just a little longer.■
[U, sing.]
1. ~ (of sth) the use that is made of sth that has become available
eg. There has been a high uptake of the free training.
eg. He swots for hours every day to prepare for his exams.
eg. She swotted history in order to become a knowledgeable historian.
eg. The students are swotting for their final exams.
eg. The employees swotted to finish the project on time.
eg. She is always swotting away at her computer, trying to meet deadlines.
▪ ,swot sth ↔ 'up | ,swot 'up on sth
(BrE, informal) to study a particular subject very hard, especially in order to prepare for an exam
eg. Make sure you swot up on the company before the interview.
eg. I need to swot up on my Spanish vocabulary before the test.
