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.

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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"

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