This modern management structure is hurting workplace communication, a survey says
This modern management structure is hurting workplace communication, a survey says
By Inc. | Published: 2025-10-21 21:00:00 | Source: Fast Company – leadership-2
seeking a Flatter management structure It is a leading trend that you can compare to fashion’s obsession with skinny jeans.Fashionable yesterday, You forget about tomorrow, and then they’re back in style again before you know it. Recently, Big technology companies likeMeta, Microsoft and Google made headlines for cutting management positions to cut and increase costs productivity– Shift some of their workloads to Amnesty International§ Tools.
But a New scan From San Francisco-based workplace communications company Firstup explains that eliminating too many administrative functions can have some unexpected impacts on the way your teams work, sometimes hurting employee engagement, undermining productivity. This is definitely something you should keep in mind if you are thinking about restructuring the management ranks at your company.
The survey’s top results show that employees believe middle management layers are essential to a company’s success. More than half of people surveyed said their line manager is their “most trusted source” for the latest workplace news – compared to just 10% who believe senior leadership is the best source of this information.
Interestingly, the Firstup survey, which questioned 1,000 US-based full-time non-management employees at companies that laid off workers in the past year, shows that entry-level employees believe their middle management layers are critical to their well-being at work. 75% of respondents said they rely on managers for recognition and appreciation, 63% said they rely on them for help with workplace challenges, while 50% said they seek training and development advice from managers. Meanwhile, 86% of people said they rely on managers to “translate” company updates into helpful advice about what the changes mean for individual workers.
This paints a picture of junior employees relying on their layers of middle management as a barrier of trust and information between them and senior leadership – perhaps indicating “Ivory tower– A syndrome surrounding senior management
Other survey details offer a deeper look at what happens when layoffs hit a company’s management structure
38% of survey respondents said that since their companies experienced layoffs, it has become difficult to reach their managers. This had consequences: 30% of people said they felt less supported when things broke down or changed, 34% expected they would lose a sense of connection, and 30% expected reduced or no access to mentoring and career development options.
Employees also don’t trust senior leaders, with nearly 40% saying they can’t get guidance or direction from senior management, 37% saying they feel like senior leaders don’t hear them, and only 47% agreeing that their company’s leadership is “somewhat” transparent.
This paints an interesting picture of how the average American employee views his management, relying on his immediate supervisors while seemingly distrusting the upper echelons of company leadership. The report quotes Bill Schuh, CEO of Firstup, who explained that the data shows that workers view middle managers as important “for translating organizational priorities into action, clarity and communication for their direct reports.”
As companies let go of middle managers, they risk losing this vital link, which can leave frontline workers feeling lost and unsupported. This dissatisfaction is likely to reduce their engagement with their work, and can reduce their productivity. At the same time, Schuh also noted that stripping directors of their positions increases pressure on their remaining colleagues. This means companies are “asking fewer managers to do more, and that’s simply not sustainable,” he said. While AI is useful in handling some mundane managerial tasks, it “will never replace the human communication and leadership that great managers provide.”
What does this mean for your company?
In smaller organizations, there may be a direct line of communication between senior leaders and front-line workers: but this data is still important. If you are considering downsizing your middle management structure, you should consider how this will impact employees’ confidence and expectations for career advancement. Open and honest conversations can improve trust levels among your employees and help support them correlation And productivity in times of turmoil.
-Kate Eaton
This article originally appeared on Fast companyMy sister’s post, a company.
a company. He is the voice of the American businessman. We inspire, educate, and document the most amazing people in business: the risk-takers, innovators, and adventurers who represent the most dynamic force in the American economy.
The early deadline for Fast Company’s World Changing Ideas Awards is Friday, November 14, at 11:59 PM PT. Apply today.
(Signs for translation) Leadership
ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ
