The Great Flattening sounds like an efficient strategy on paper until you’re one of the employees left picking up the slack. In Korn Ferry’s 2025 Workforce survey, 41% of employees said their organization had reduced management layers. But cutting layers can significantly expand the jobs of the workers who remain.

Many managers find themselves leading teams while still handling individual-contributor duties. Other employees absorb tasks previously handled by managers. Yet titles, salaries, staffing levels and resources don’t necessarily increase along with those expectations.

The result can be a flatter organization that asks more of fewer people. For employees affected, the question is whether those increased job demands are sustainable and moving their careers forward.

Fewer Managers Are Doing More

Cutting management layers doesn’t eliminate the projects those managers were handling. Instead, many of those duties shift to the remaining employees. Deloitte describes today’s managers as project supervisors, coaches, administrators, change agents and problem solvers, often while continuing to contribute directly themselves.

Gallup found that 97% of managers have individual-contributor duties and spend a median 40% of their time on them. That player-coach model can become harder to sustain when organizations remove layers without narrowing the manager’s scope. Managers end up overseeing people, solving operational problems and producing their own deliverables at the same time.

Managers Are Responsible For Larger Teams

As companies reduce layers, the managers who remain can inherit additional direct reports. In Gallup’s research, the average span of control rose from 10.9 employees in 2024 to 12.1 in 2025. About 22% of........

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