Management asks employees to pick up their managers' work after layoffs without an increase in pay: 'We went from weekly 1-on-1s and actual support to a 15-minute standup once a week'

Like in those cup stacking competitions you used to do in PE for some reason in 5th grade, organizations grow and expand, stacking ever higher. Stacking up from a singular stack up into a great pyramid, before then collapsing them all back down again into a singular stack once more. 

It's inevitable, really. 

During this expansion phase of an organization, managers almost seem to proliferate, and the organization starts building new layers of management to manage the managers, when there simply become too many managers for one manager to manage. 

It reaches a point where, inexplicably, there are managers who are doing nothing but holding meetings to talk about the need to further talk about the things that they're going to talk about doing, and there gets to be a whole lot of talking about doing things and very little is actually getting done at all. The wheels are spinning in the air, but very little rubber actually touches road.

They start outnumbering the actual productive staff, eclipsing them entirely in the actual cost to the company's bottom line. There's this built-in, divisive disconnect where managers and their talk become entirely disconnected from the reality of the work being completed.

But when harder times hit, and growth stagnates, and the company starts looking desperately for any way to show record profits, the phase of collapsing the cups back into the single stack begins. However, unlike with our cupstacking metaphor, it's impossible for the company to simply stack back down into the same shape that it started. There are organizational artifacts of the expansion period, department heads who, despite having their entire department reduced to nothing, when asked to serve up their list of staff layoffs, would never dream of listing themselves, who would?

There's a probably decade-old meme that lives rent-free in my head for exactly this situation, which I think represents this symptom of "managerilism" better than anything else. The bloated beast of a shell of the former current organization simply persists on with all the department heads gathered around, wondering why the ship is still sinking, while relatively little of the remaining staff in the organization is doing anything at all. 

Author image for Brad Dickson Brad Dickson
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  • A meme about what often happens in workplaces during layoffs
    via ayhme
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  • Beyond structure, despite having fewer staff, the organization still expects the same amount of work to be completed; going backwards is simply unexpected. Responsibilities, tasks, and production then become like our cup stacking once more as they are slid down and piled onto the remaining staff, adding to an already full stack of responsibilities.

    That's what this employee shared experiencing when their manager, the middle manager above them, was let go. They found themselves being greeted with all of their manager's tasks for little pay, being asked to “take ownership" of projects and tasks that had once been a manager's responsibility, without the pay that would normally come with it. Exasperated the worker turned to appealing for other's insight.

  • "Company just laid off half the middle managers and wants us to pick up the slack"

    i came across something today that said middle managers are getting cut but their role is somehow "more important than ever." yeah, tell that to my team. my manager got let go two weeks ago. not performance issues, just "restructuring." now our team of 5 is
    via christianityshop
  • A worker gestures in a confused manner while working through something on their laptop
    via Getty Images For Unsplash+
  • expected to report directly to a vp who oversees 4 other teams. we went from weekly 1-on-1s and actual support to a 15-minute standup once a week where he barely remembers our names.
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  • the kicker? they want us to "self- organize" and "take ownership" of projects that used to have dedicated oversight. translation: do the manager's job for free while they pocket the salary savings.
    via christianityshop
  • i'm a senior engineer, not a people manager. i didn't sign up to coordinate timelines, resolve conflicts between team members, and chase down resources from other departments. but here we are.
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  • has anyone else been through this? did you end up just quietly taking on the extra work, or did you push back? i'm seriously considering updating my resume because this feels unsustainable.
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  • ChampionForeign4533 . 10h ago Just my 2 cents: this needs pushback. You and your colleagues need to do your jobs to the best of your abilities, as always, and let the chips fall where they fall. If the project fails or underperforms just have your receipts ready to prove you did your jobs. Need some resources? Email the VP let him figure it out. He's management, you're not. This is the kind of pushback I mean. But, yeah, go ahead and start looking elsewhere.
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  • NiSiSuinegEht Any time corporate start talking about "taking ownership" I ask when the profit sharing starts and at what rate.
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  • MbembasTuxedo I went through something very similar, all managers were removed and everyone reported the CEO. Same thing happened, 1:1s gone, told to figure it out, targets went up with less. resource to achieve them, worst part is it was a sales role and they didn't even have a day of experience in that kind of role. I left within 3 months, it was a sinking ship, within 6 months my whole team had gone.
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  • indicatprincess My job fired my manager, and his manager in May. I have. adjusted my workload accordingly, due to the unforeseen obstacles in place that come when removing key people out of the work flow chain. A.k.a. there isn't a chance in fucking hell I'm picking up any more work after you fired people I needed. They had to hire two assistants to cover us after that.
    via christianityshop
  • PhilosopherSad123 we all organized when something similar happened. Just did our regular jobs, didn't do the new responsibilities. Place fell apart fast. As long as you all stick together the VPs all of a sudden with have egg on their face. They brought back middle management after 1 month, but they all had raises
    via christianityshop
  • teresajs Refuse to take on the manager tasks. The VP will do that work, or it won't get done. There's some argument that there are too many layers of middle management in many companies and that organizations could potentially cut the number of managers, but that relies on reducing some of the work being done by those managers, not shifting the work to their employees.
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  • jodrellbank_pants My old company just layed of every engineer 15 of them and passed it to a third party company, my friend got a new job in 5 days with more pay. Been there done that in the end it will cost them so much after a few years they will dump the third party company
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  • Rusty Nards I'd continue to do my job without the hassle of middle management breathing down my neck. Take on no new responsibilities as that is now the job of higher ups to absorb those responsibilities.
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