Uber is reducing its workforce by 10%, or about 3,300 workers, in its largest job cuts since the pandemic, CEO Dara Khosrowshahi announced yesterday.
The changes, which follow a period of solid growth at the ride-sharing giant, are intended to speed up decision-making by reducing the number of management layers, Khosrowshahi wrote in a memo to employees. The number of workers who sit seven or more layers from the CEO has fallen by 20%, and the number of “micro-teams” with only one or two reports has been cut nearly in half.
The restructuring is further evidence that the so-called Great Flattening – the trend in the corporate world toward reducing layers of middle management – shows no signs of slowing down. In recent years, companies like Meta, Amazon, Google and Microsoft have aggressively eliminated managerial roles on the belief that, in the words of Mark Zuckerberg, “flatter is faster.”
Spurred on by the rise of artificial intelligence, the Great Flattening has already reshaped the workforce dramatically. Overall, the average number of people reporting to managers has increased from 10.9 in 2024 to 12.1 in 2025 and is up nearly 50% since 2013, according to Gallup. In Korn Ferry’s 2025 Workforce survey, 41% of employees said their organization had reduced management layers.
The Great Flattening has created a massive natural experiment in what happens when companies slim down middle management. Is there a point where flatter stops meaning faster and starts meaning poorly managed?
While the jury is still out, the results so far have been decidedly mixed.
Several companies have touted productivity gains after engaging in aggressive “flattening” campaigns. The life science multinational Bayer, which trimmed as many as six organizational layers and reduced management positions by roughly two-thirds, has said that some product-development cycles have been dramatically shortened and that, overall, it is on track for €2 billion (around $2.3 billion) in annual organizational savings by the end of 2026.
At Citi, after an aggressive reorganization under CEO Jane Fraser reduced the number of management layers from 13 to eight, financial performance clearly improved. While it is impossible to attribute these gains directly to restructuring, it is safe to say that the management reductions didn’t cripple the company.
However, other examples show that the Great Flattening could be taking a toll. After reducing its workforce by more than 20% in 2023, Meta saw jumps in revenue, operating income and operating margin the following year – only to run into widespread employee discontent when it launched another restructuring earlier this year.
Commentators have identified a number of long-term risks associated with cutting middle management too aggressively – from degrading institutional knowledge to sapping a key pipeline of future leaders – and floated novel solutions for manager burnout.
Indeed, for the middle managers who survive, the Great Flattening may be making a job that was already a pressure cooker completely intolerable.
In January, 97% of managers surveyed told Gallup that they have some individual contributor responsibilities in addition to leading others. Managers who spent less than 40% of their time on individual contributor work reported higher engagement than those who spent more than 40%. Manager engagement fell nine percentage points since 2022, including a five point drop (to 22% from 27%) between 2024 and 2025 alone.
That may be the tension Uber is about to test. Khosrowshahi is betting that fewer layers and larger teams will make the company move faster. But as the Great Flattening enters its next phase, the more important question may be whether the managers left behind can keep up.
