What the Great Flattening means for middle management

In the current climate, businesses are seeing less need for middle managers – this is not only concerning for those professionals but also detrimental to long-term business health.

In this episode of The HR Leader Podcast, host Jerome Doraisamy speaks with BoldHR founder Rebecca Houghton about the work she does and why it’s meaningful, the emergence of the Great Flattening, its implications for the workforce, the outsized impact that middle managers have, why businesses misunderstand the impact that middle managers have, and moving past inaccurate perceptions.

Houghton also delves into how Australian businesses are reacting to this trend, being perceived as fiscal bloat, how lower-level employees are exacerbating this trend, what we’ve learnt from previous instances of this workplace trend, the consequences of the current iteration of the trend, and the questions and practical steps that businesses need to ask and implement respectively.