By: Grace Sullivan
Organizations have spent the past few years quietly flattening their management layers, and the numbers show it. The average number of employees reporting to a single manager in the U.S. rose from 10.9 in 2024 to 12.1 in 2025, according to Gallup, a nearly 50 percent increase in team size since Gallup began tracking the measure in 2013. Large tech companies have eliminated layers of middle management outright. Analyses of recent layoff waves suggest middle managers have absorbed a disproportionate share of the cuts, a trend some now call the “Great Flattening.”
The assumption behind that trend is straightforward. Fewer managers, more direct reports each, lower overhead. What Gallup’s research complicates is the idea that this is free.
The Real Constraint Isn’t Team Size, It’s Time
Gallup’s analysis found that 97 percent of managers carry individual contributor work alongside their leadership responsibilities, tasks like a store supervisor stocking shelves or a technology manager contributing hands-on to the same projects as the team they lead. The median manager spends 40 percent of their time on that kind of work rather than on managing people. Cross a threshold beyond that, and engagement drops, regardless of how many people report to them. Managers who spend less than 40 percent of their time on individual contributor work maintain meaningfully higher engagement than the average.
That distinction, between team size and time available to actually lead, is where the flattening trend runs into a problem most org charts don’t account for. Widening a manager’s span of control without reducing what else is competing for their time doesn’t just redraw reporting lines. It changes how much of the job they were promoted for, developing people, they can actually do.
What Gets Squeezed Out First
Gallup’s research points to one habit that matters more than almost any other for employee engagement: managers giving each employee meaningful, individual feedback at least once a week. Employees who strongly agree they received that kind of feedback in the past week are engaged at roughly seven in ten, regardless of team size. Employees who don’t report that are engaged at closer to one in four. And yet, across a separate Gallup study of nearly 15,000 employees, only 16 percent said their last conversation with their manager was extremely meaningful.
The habit that moves engagement the most is also the one most vulnerable to a manager’s calendar filling up with everything else. A short, regular conversation is easy to skip when a schedule conflict needs resolving, a policy question needs answering for the third time that day, or a stack of survey feedback needs sorting before anyone can act on it. None of that work is optional. All of it competes directly with the fifteen or thirty minutes Gallup’s data says matters most.
Where Workforce Technology Enters the Picture
Tushneem Dharmagadda, founder of the workforce experience and operations platform HubEngage, has watched this tension play out across frontline and distributed organizations, where the administrative load on managers tends to be heaviest and the least visible from the top of the org chart. His view is that most workforce technology investment has been aimed at the wrong side of the equation, adding tools that generate more information for managers to process rather than reducing the volume of low-judgment work competing for their time in the first place.
The distinction he draws is between technology that adds another task to a manager’s list and technology that removes one. Scheduling conflicts handled inside the system rather than escalated, policy questions routed to an automated assistant before they reach a manager, survey feedback delivered already sorted into patterns rather than as a pile of individual responses- each of those is work that would otherwise compete with the fifteen minutes Gallup’s research identifies as the highest-leverage thing a manager can do all week.
Talent Still Matters, But It Needs Room to Show Up
Gallup’s research is careful not to reduce this to a technology problem alone. Manager talent, measured across traits like motivation, collaboration, and analytical thinking, remains the strongest predictor of whether a larger team succeeds or struggles. Talented managers facing large teams and heavy individual contributor workloads maintain higher engagement than less talented managers in the same position. But talent operating inside a calendar with no time left for coaching still produces a coaching conversation that doesn’t happen.
That’s the more precise version of the argument Dharmagadda makes: the goal isn’t fewer managers or lighter oversight; it’s making sure the managers organizations already have, including the talented ones, spend their limited time on the fifteen minutes that move engagement rather than the administrative load that doesn’t.
The Flattening Trend Isn’t Reversing
Nothing in Gallup’s data suggests companies are about to add management layers back. The pressure toward wider spans of control is structural, driven by cost discipline, AI-driven efficiency expectations, and a labor market that rewards leaner org charts. Gallup’s own recommendation isn’t to stop flattening; it’s to make sure organizations know which of their managers have the talent and the time to handle it before they do.
For organizations serious about that second part, time, the answer isn’t found in the org chart. It’s found in how much of a manager’s day gets consumed by work that has nothing to do with the people reporting to them, and how much of that work could disappear before it ever reaches their calendar.
