Written by: Kieran Delamont, Associate Editor, London Inc. Originally published in WorkLife by London Inc.

Welcome to the era of the megamanager

The great middle manager flattening is in full swing, and those who remain are seeing their dominions balloon

With companies looking to trim down their org charts and flatten hierarchies, some say we’re quickly entering the age of the ‘megamanager’ — a phenomenon where middle managers (the ones that are left, anyways) are seeing the number of employees they oversee rise very quickly, and are expected to handle the increased workload, often without much additional support.

“In the past few years, the ranks of middle managers — bosses who sit between executive leaders and frontline staff — have been shrinking,” wrote Sarah E. Needleman in Business Insider. “Companies such as Meta, Citigroup, UPS and Amazon have moved to streamline operations amid heightened economic uncertainty and rising AI spending.” According to Indeed, middle management jobs dropped by more than 12 per cent in 2025.

The data bears this out. A January survey by Gallup shows the average number of people reporting to managers rising from 10.9 in 2024 to 12.1 in 2025 (about a 10 per cent increase year-over-year), and since 2013, the average team size has risen by nearly 50 per cent. Across the board, managers are being asked to do more now than they were 10 years ago; 97 per cent of them told Gallup they also have some contributor responsibilities as well.

What Gallup found, though, was the increase was not distributed equally: rather, the megamanager phenomenon is occurring more at the top, in large companies, often in the tech sector, where AI has taken the biggest bite out of the middle management ranks. In this tranche, team sizes are sprawling, and 13 per cent of managers are now overseeing teams of 25 staff or more.

While the implementation of AI tools may be able to smooth over some of the problems, some in management are worried the megamanager trend risks significant drawbacks. “With 25 or more direct reports, meaningful conversations become impossible if leaders are mentally elsewhere,” wrote Matt Poepsel in HR Zone. “The problem is that everything feels urgent when you’re operating in constant reactivity. Every Slack message, every headline, every request from your growing team demands immediate attention.”

Gallup’s data found that the changing management ratios are coming with a cost. “Managers are struggling more today than in the past,” Gallup said. “More managers report burnout, stress, jobseeking behaviour and lower engagement.”

And the megamanagers themselves are reporting the same thing. One manager, Chine Mmegwa, told Business Insider her team expanded from three reports to 24 across three continents after the company gutted the middle-management ranks in a restructure.

“I can’t be a manager of this many people and still be the go-to person for every single need,” they said. “This whole thing only works if everybody levels up.”

Your next raise might not be cash. It might be AI tokens

Tokenmaxxing your salary: Are compute credits the future of compensation?

There’s a new front opening in salary negotiations, both at top tech companies and, to a lesser degree, the rest of the white-collar sector, as candidates and employees now have a simple ask: “How many tokens you offering me?”

With many technical and software-based jobs coming with the explicit or implicit expectation that the employee will make use of AI tools, candidates and employees are now starting to care more about the tokens of it all — that is, how much they can use the tool. And on the flipside, managers and company leaders are increasingly looking to token usage as a key metric of how much they are using the tools.

For some, ‘tokenmaxxing’ has become the name of the game.

“Engineers at companies including Meta and OpenAI are competing on internal leaderboards that track token consumption,” reported TechCrunch. The New York Times recently said that “generous token budgets are becoming a job perk, like dental insurance or free lunch, and some are spending thousands of dollars a month trying to automate as much of their own work as possible.”

Companies like Shopify are reportedly factoring in raw AI usage into performance metrics — rewarding heavy users, flagging those who aren’t using the tools.

It seems that AI is reaching an interesting fork in the road: is access to an AI tool like Claude or ChatGPT, and the usage budget that comes along with it, the next iteration of the company laptop (i.e, a tool that you need for your job, rebranded as a perk) or is more like company equity (i.e., a way to attract top talent)?

Not everyone is thrilled with the notion of AI token budgets being dressed up as a perk or as compensation. CFO Jamaal Glenn wrote that people should “not be fooled into accepting AI tokens as compensation,” arguing that the idea of making employees pay for a productivity tool is “corporate propaganda, pure and simple. It is the equivalent of telling you that the cost of the software and hardware you use is part of your pay.”

Others warn companies against falling too far into this line of thinking because it risks spiralling AI costs. “In an environment where AI is used to justify headcount reductions, visible and aggressive AI usage is a form of career insurance. The engineer who tokenmaxxes today is the engineer who cannot be accused of underusing the tools tomorrow,” Campbell Robertson wrote. “The incentive is perfectly rational. The aggregate consequence for the CFO, though, is a budget leak that nobody has a line item for.”

 

Nonetheless, it does appear that candidates in technical roles are still willing to move if the tokens are there. And companies are willing to pick up the tab. As Charles Lamanna, vice-president at Microsoft put it, “If an engineer is like $500,000, fully loaded, with $100,000 of tokens a year to make them three times as efficient, that’s a great deal for everyone involved.”

Why you should be talking about politics at work

Turns out discussing the news at work can actually foster wellbeing

One must always be a bit cautious talking about the news at work — you never really know, after all, what might be a third-rail topic for your coworkers, what kind of reaction you’ll get from your boss or whether your IT guy believes the earth is flat.

But some new research suggests the way many workplaces have tried to navigate this — with blanket ‘no politics at work’ rules — are neither effective, nor helpful, especially at times when the news is creating a high degree of stress.

The gist of the research, conducted by Washington State University academic Kristine Kuhn, found that not only were prohibitions on or guidances against discussing politics and news at work ineffective (people do still talk about these things), but that they were actually causing staff to be more stressed, since they were losing out on an opportunity to process the events by talking with like-minded colleagues.

“In our studies, people who talked about breaking politicized news with their coworkers found it to be more helpful than harmful,” Kuhn told the Academy of Management (AOM) Discoveries publication, which published the paper. “Overall, discussing the news with coworkers was associated with less emotional exhaustion, improved mood and greater social support.”

Their research tackled this topic by focusing on a few key events, including the 2020 and 2024 U.S. presidential elections. They asked survey participants to fill out two surveys — one in the morning that asked them how they were feeling about the news, and one in the evening, asking them how or if they discussed the news with colleagues. While people’s individual reactions to the news depended on their personal political views, it didn’t lead to the kind of conflict or incivility that is often cited as the reason for keeping the discussion away from work.

“Results suggested that sharing reactions with coworkers may have helped buffer the effects of negative emotional reactions to political news,” wrote Kym Liebler of the AOM. “In this study,” Kuhn said, “we found that talking about the election was associated with receiving more support from coworkers, not incivility.”

Perhaps this kind of research can’t come too soon. Of late, the news has not been all that easy to process, and many companies have adopted uncritically the belief that political discussions are net-destructive to company culture and workplace satisfaction. But this research suggests the opposite: that for many people, their coworkers are people they turn to already.

One aspect of this is that people are good at self-selecting who they talk with about these sorts of topics: most staff are able to avoid conflict when it comes to talking about the news in part because they know intuitively who they can talk to safely and without starting a fight.

“Most people do not want to make themselves feel worse by sparking confrontation,” Kuhn pointed out. “When they do share, it seems to be more helpful than not. Employees can find support during tough times that weigh heavily on people.”

Is networking supposed to feel this transactional?

If the number of connections we have on social media and in our database were all that mattered, then every one of us would be basking in unparalleled success

If you’re desperately ready to get off the merry-go-round of LinkedIn networking, you’re not alone. One moment you’re just trading profiles, but quickly that connection fades into the sea of other LinkedIn users that populate your feed. What might have felt like a promising connection — maybe someone who could even link you up with a new gig — becomes just more digital noise.

A new poll from Express Employment shows how widespread the sentiment is becoming: the poll, conducted in partnership with Harris Poll, found that 76 per cent of jobseekers say that networking, especially networking done online, feels like little more than a business transaction; 70 per cent of hiring managers said the same.

What was often sold as the positive practice of building relationships seems to be growing less and less personal, with 69 per cent of jobseekers saying the whole thing is just about surfacing job opportunities, not building an actual network. And 76 per cent of them believe that LinkedIn and other online platforms shoulder the blame for this.

“The most valuable connections in our professional lives come from showing up with authenticity and a genuine interest in others,” said Bob Funk Jr., president and CEO of Express Employment.

This likely does not describe the average experience of logging on to LinkedIn, to say the least. “Technology can help us meet, but it’s our human commitment to listen, engage and invest in people that gives those connections lasting worth.”

What’s interesting though, is there’s a structural irony here: although networking is viewed as more important now than it was ten years ago (86 per cent of hiring managers telling Express that it’s a critical part of hiring and 60 per cent of jobseekers saying networking benefitted them), the online tools used to make it frictionless have rendered it hollow and transactional. LinkedIn itself is a giant contradiction; it is in many ways an optimal networking tool (if viewed through the context of efficiency and visibility), but one that seems to destroy what jobseekers truly need in the form of actual human networks.

“Online platforms were supposed to make meeting people easier, but instead, they’ve introduced a new layer of artificiality,” the Express survey concluded. “In other words, the ‘what can you do for me?’ energy is unmistakable.”