- It’s been a grim start to the year with major US companies cutting thousands of jobs.
Put simply, if you don’t have a day-to-day interaction with your manager, it’s easier on a human level to let go of someone, he added.
Andy Challenger, senior vice president of outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas reiterated this in recent comments to The Wall Street Journal.
“When a hiring manager gets news they have to cut 10% of the staff, it’s easier to put someone on the list you don’t have a close personal relationship with,” he said.
Middle managers are also vulnerable, experts say. Last year, tech firms like Meta, Amazon, and Salesforce all made cuts to these roles or gave them the option to transition into a contributor position.
Contributor positions refer to roles that don’t involve managing other people but instead focusing on tasks like coding or research.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in 2023: “I don’t think you want a management structure that’s just managers managing managers, managing managers, managing managers, managing the people who are doing the work.”
Daniel Zhao, a lead economist at Glassdoor, told Bloomberg that middle managers are often squeezed from both sides at a time like this.
“They’re often cut, but they’re also often responsible for implementing these measures to get more efficient,” he said.
It’s time to ‘show up’
Though remote work remains popular among workers, many companies have started to put return-to-office mandates in place over the past year, potentially signaling the end of the golden age of remote work.
One expert, Daniel Keum, who is an associate professor of management at Columbia Business School, told Bloomberg that if remote workers want to prevent being laid off they should “show up” and “show commitment.”
“The era of remote work is in decline. If the work can be done remotely, it can be moved abroad,” he said.
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