The fastest route to a flatter organization is a layoff. American employers advertised 42 percent fewer middle-management jobs at the end of 2024 than they did in the spring of 2022, according to Deloitte (2025). That is a structural change dressed as a cost cut, and most companies are treating the two as the same thing. They are not.
There are two ways to lose a layer of management. You can subtract it, or you can build an organization that never asked for it in the first place. On the chart the two results look identical. In practice they behave like opposites.
Subtraction is not design
When a manager's box disappears in a reorganization, the coordination that box held does not vanish with it. Deloitte's 2025 survey of nearly 10,000 leaders across 93 countries found that managers already spend close to 40 percent of their time firefighting and on administrative work, and only 13 percent developing the people who report to them (Deloitte, 2025). Strip out the role and that firefighting has to land somewhere. Usually it lands on the people who remain, who now hold a wider span with less time to think.
This is why so many flattening exercises produce a quiet second wave of cost. McKinsey's survey of more than 2,500 business leaders found that two-thirds already see their organizations as overly complex and inefficient, and only half believe they are prepared to anticipate and react to external shocks (McKinsey, 2023). A layer removed without a plan does not simplify that picture. It scatters the work the layer was absorbing, and complexity resurfaces as slower decisions and busier calendars.
The tell is engagement. Gallup's 2025 survey of more than 263,000 people recorded manager engagement falling from 27 percent to 22 percent between 2024 and 2025, the steepest annual drop of any group in the workforce (Gallup, 2025). Managers are being cut from above and squeezed from within at the same time. A subtraction strategy treats that as a happy coincidence. It is closer to a warning.
What designed flat looks like
The contrast case is a Dutch home-care company that never built the layer to begin with. Buurtzorg runs more than 900 self-managing nursing teams and roughly 14,700 staff with two directors, about 50 back-office employees, and no middle managers or supervisors at all (Martela and Nandram, 2025). The coordination did not go missing. It was placed deliberately: inside the teams, which set their own rosters and hire their own colleagues, and beside them in a thin support structure of coaches with no formal authority.
That placement is the whole point. Buurtzorg's back office runs lean because the frontline absorbs work that a supervisor would otherwise carry, and because the model was scoped to conditions where that transfer is realistic. The authors are explicit that it suits settings with low interdependence between teams and highly motivated, competent frontline staff (Martela and Nandram, 2025). Flat here is not the absence of management. It is management redistributed on purpose to the people closest to the work.
None of this is free, and the company's own numbers say so. By the analysis Buurtzorg is best known for, its overhead ran near 8 percent against a Dutch home-care average closer to 25 percent, but its cost per hour of care came in higher than a large comparator, not lower (Martela and Nandram, 2025). Designed flat buys speed, retention, and morale. It does not automatically buy a cheaper unit of work. The honesty of that trade is exactly what a layoff-driven flattening skips.
The decision most companies never make
The difference between the two roads is a single question asked before anyone is removed: who inherits the coordination this person was doing? Deloitte's finding that managers spend only 13 percent of their time developing people is not an argument that the other 87 percent was wasted (Deloitte, 2025). Scheduling, escalation, sense-making, and the quiet brokering of information are real work. If a company cannot name where each of those tasks will go, it is not flattening. It is amputating.
Ricardo Semler's long argument for self-managing organizations rests on the same premise the Buurtzorg case demonstrates: you remove the supervisor by first pushing the decision rights and the information down to the people doing the job, not after. The order matters. Redistribute first and the box can go. Remove the box first and the work becomes homeless.
The practical read is uncomfortable for anyone reaching for the org chart as a cost lever. Flattening by subtraction is fast, legible to a board, and cheap on the spreadsheet in the first quarter. Flattening by design is slow, demands new plumbing for information and decisions, and shows its savings in retention and cycle time rather than headcount. The companies that confuse the two will keep discovering that the layer they cut is still doing its job, now unpaid and unassigned, inside everyone else's week.
Sources
- Deloitte (2025). 2025 Global Human Capital Trends. US middle-management job postings fell 42 percent from spring 2022 to end 2024, and managers spend ~40% firefighting versus 13% developing people, showing the work outlasts the role. https://www.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/topics/talent/human-capital-trends/2025.html
- Martela and Nandram (2025). Buurtzorg: scaling up an organization with hundreds of self-managing teams but no middle managers. Buurtzorg runs 900+ teams and ~14,700 staff with two directors and no middle managers, the model of designed rather than subtracted flatness. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s41469-024-00184-y
- McKinsey (2023). The State of Organizations 2023. Two-thirds of 2,500+ leaders see their organizations as overly complex, showing where the coordination goes when a layer is cut without a plan. https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/people-and-organizational-performance/our-insights/the-state-of-organizations-2023
- Gallup (2025). State of the Global Workplace 2025. Manager engagement fell from 27% to 22% between 2024 and 2025, the steepest drop of any group, evidence the middle is squeezed as well as cut. https://www.gallup.com/workplace/659610/state-global-workplace.aspx