The great post-pandemic middle-manager cull

I predicted it in the midst of the pandemic, in June 2021, and now it’s coming to pass: the realization that videoconferencing was the key to in-house communication — as well as with freelancers and people working from home — has allowed companies to continue functioning amid lockdown and beyond. The losers in this new approach however, have been middle managers.

The facts are unequivocal: US companies are in the midst of a major restructuring that has seen mass layoffs of middle managers. Elon Musk looks set to repeat his strategy at Twitter with the US civil service, while Mark Zuckerberg has cut layers of middle management at Meta. Now, more and more companies are following suit. The idea of “managers who manage managers who manage managers who manage managers and who, ultimately, manage the people who are actually doing the work” seems less and less appealing.

Citi used to have 13 management levels; it now has eight, which is plenty. UPS fired as many as 12,00 of its 85,000 managers to improve its ratio of white and and blue-collar, or in its case, brown-collar, workers. And in September, Amazon announced plans to increase its ratio of workers to supervisors by at least 15%. Sigificantly, none of these tens of thousands of positions have been replaced with others. They have simply been eliminated.