Work takes up most of our waking hours, so getting it right matters. I'm Clif P Lewis, an organisational psychologist, and I write about what the research says makes work work.
This week in workplace whiplash 🌀
🎨 Canva’s restructure promises “small, empowered teams”
Canva is cutting, changing or relocating 1,271 roles (22%) by “collapsing layers” around “small, empowered teams”. The CEO’s memo apologises three times and dwells on sadness and hard decisions, but announces no pay cuts, forgone bonuses or role changes for leadership.🪟 Microsoft offers 60,000 employees a way out?
Microsoft is offering buyouts to about 60,000 staff, over a quarter of its workforce, to help fund AI. Not a good look as European governments ditch Microsoft one by one.
🏦 Nationwide cuts 275 more jobs after Virgin takeover
Nationwide is cutting 275 more roles to “remove duplication” after absorbing Virgin Money. Since the takeover, its CEO’s pay has nearly doubled to £4.7m, while staff pay rose 3.8%.
👉 AOL and The Guardian
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Opener
In Orwell’s Animal Farm, a fable about a revolution that ends with new bosses, the animals paint “All animals are equal” on the barn wall. By the end, the pigs live in the farmhouse and the wall adds “but some animals are more equal than others”.
I spent a year consulting for a multinational company that worked hard on its optics, from Pride lanyards at town halls to a “flat” structure of executives, group heads, team leads and everyone else. Across thousands of staff, that was hell on the team leads. When COVID sent everyone home, a fatigue policy set out working hours. I billed by the hour and didn’t much care about fatigue, but when a team lead’s green dot glowed late at night, I jokingly sent them the policy link and told them to log off.
🧠The organisational psychology lens
The org chart is not the hierarchy
My client was not unusual. Some 41% of employees told Korn Ferry their employer had cut management layers (Korn Ferry, 2025), and Gartner predicted that a fifth of organisations would flatten with AI by the end of 2026 (Gartner, 2024). Joan Acker’s (2006) concept of inequality regimes can help us understand why the team leads, not the executives, carried the ever-increasing workload. Everyday decisions about who gets the work, the pay and the say keep class, gender and racial inequality in place, regardless of what the org chart shows. When management layers give way to “flat structures”, the power of higher managerial levels is usually not changed (Acker, 2006, p. 446). More recently, Yarrow (2026) adds that AI deepens this by hiding how decisions are reached and who answers for them.
Someone still does the managing…
For example, when a manufacturer cut its supervisors, workers rebuilt the supervisory function informally (Ingvaldsen & Benders, 2020). As Jo Freeman (1972) warned, when nobody is formally in charge, someone still is, and that person answers to no one. The managing is pushed down, and tends to get harsher, a trend that has been observed in multiple studies among self-managing teams, where peers policed each other harder compared to conventional reporting structures (De Ridder & Claeyé, 2025; Khanagha, et al., 2021).
“Damn, I feel like a supervisor, I just don’t get paid for it”
…and it is rarely random who that someone is
Women see this coming. When an organisation is described as flatter, women are less likely to apply, expecting more work, slower promotion and a poorer fit (Hurst et al., 2024). Work that rarely leads to promotion has been shown to fall on women (Babcock et al., 2017). These types of organisational structures have also been shown to marginalise people of colour (Wingfield & Alston, 2014), and people belonging to multiple marginalised groups being the most easily overlooked (Purdie-Vaughns & Eibach, 2008). A flat org chart therefore hides real hierarchies, and a hierarchy nobody admits to is one nobody can challenge (Acker, 2006).
🚀What this means for leaders
The fix is a reality check and intentionality when making decisions about organisational structure:
Draw the hierarchy you actually have. Before cutting a layer, map who allocates work, settles conflict and shields the team, then make those roles explicit and accountable (Ingvaldsen & Benders, 2020). Atlassian’s free Roles and Responsibilities play finds the work nobody owns.
Let pay and authority follow the work. Wherever the tasks fall, on team leads or frontline staff, the authority and the pay should follow (Barker, 1993).
Measure support before and after you restructure. The free HSE Management Standards Indicator Tool includes validated manager-support and role scales (Edwards et al., 2008). Run it before and after cutting a layer, and share the results.
💬 Final thoughts
My quarrel is with simplistic hierarchy, and my sympathy is with the people who suffer when middle managers are taken out on the assumption that “flat is better”. A “flat” org chart is just the slogan on the barn wall. All animals are equal, but some are still online at midnight.
How's the depth of today's edition?
If something here speaks to you, I’d love to hear it.
Stay human,
Clif
P.S. Where do your pre-hire criteria stop matching what your team surely values and rewards? Reply to this email and let me know.
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