Watch | Fate of middle managers in a world of cost-cuts 

In this episode of Business Matters, we look at job cuts targeting more and more of middle management roles

About a decade ago, when I was taking a sabbatical from journalism and trying my hand at software delivery management, we came across a customer who had a limited budget. One of the first things he asked to be done was to knock off the project manager profile from the quotation to help him save costs. His point was “I am a technologist, your team is full of technologists. We will have daily calls on status. I will have a fair idea of what’s going on without the help of a manager. Don’t add to my costs.” 

Cut to 2024, that trend may only be picking up pace. 

In 2016, the Harvard Business Review published a now-popular piece titled “Excess Management Is Costing the U.S. $3 Trillion Per Year”.

Authors Gary Hamel and Michel Zanini argued that at that time, the average in American companies was one manager for 4.7 employees. They looked at the best-run companies and suggested that it should be possible to bring that ratio to one manager for 10 employees. At that time, it would have ‘freed up’ 12.5 million employees for other work that is more creative and productive, in the authors’ words. 

With the maturing of automation, machine learning and artificial intelligence technologies, a lot of the mundane tasks do not need human intervention any more. In 2020, Gartner predicted that 69% of all our tasks would be fully automated by 2024. Of course, they don’t have an update yet on whether that was achieved, so we will wait to see that follow-up.

Closer to our times, American logistics major UPS announced in January that it would cut 12,000 management jobs. Note the words, specifically, jobs to do with a management profile, out of its 85,000 workforce.

Citigroup, also in January, said it planned to cut 20,000 jobs after its worst quarterly results in a decade, but this announcement came only after a first round of job cuts targetted specifically at senior managers.