Boss trend threatening thousands of Aussie workers: 'Nowhere to hide'

An urgent warning has been sent out to middle managers across Australia. While the job market is already fairly tight at the moment, the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) could see more people without a job unless they get their act together now.

A global trend called "The Great Unbossing" has caused middle managers to be dumped to trim the fat of corporate hierarchies, but there are now fears AI could convince more workplaces to jump on the bandwagon. Middle management expert Rebecca Houghton explained to Yahoo Finance where she believes the trend will hit Australia the hardest over the coming months.

"Very traditional organisations that have always had quite a fat middle, they're going to be under a lot of pressure to modernise," she said.

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"If you look at the public sector, for example, these bigger, more traditional cultures, where they are less willing to rely on technology... they will probably end up cutting, or they are already cutting middle managers, but not investing heavily or quickly in AI as a replacement, and that too is going to cause a bit of a crisis internally."

She added this is particularly important considering the Australian public sector is the largest employer in the country when you add up all the people employed at a local, state and federal level.

According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, there are roughly 2.43 million public sector workers employed at the moment, but it's unclear how many of those are middle managers.

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Why are middle managers targeted in The Great Unbossing?

Houghton said middle managers sometimes get a bad rap in the corporate world.

They manage peoples' workload, keep them on track with KPIs, and make sure everything is running smoothly, but they don't often have the stress of the much bigger work that's produced by workers on the lower rungs, she explained.

But with AI, technology will be able to take on a lot of those mundane middle management tasks, which will cause some workplaces to question whether the manager is needed at all.

"Tomorrow's middle manager will see AI as a brilliant sidekick," Hougton told Yahoo Finance.

"AI is going to be their best friend who will do all the admin work that they've been hating for ages, but takes them away from doing the stuff they're really valuable for.

"Yesterday's level manager is going to be scared of AI, because once that work goes, if they don't have anything else to offer, then there's nowhere to hide."

What can middle managers do to avoid getting fired?

The expert told Yahoo Finance that middle managers need to be proactive to ensure they aren't earmarked for severance.

"Make sure that when the machine comes and does it better, faster and cheaper, that you have something else to offer, and make it clear that you have something else to offer," she said.

She encouraged workers to learn how these AI systems work so that they can not only use them to their advantage, but they can potentially help design them in the future.

"Get on that bandwagon, re-skill yourself as the driver of the AI because you're the expert in the work," she explained.

"If you can't do that, then you need to re-skill yourself and you need to be showing that now because the next step will be cutting heads, and you want to make sure you're on the right list, not the wrong list."

How has The Great Unbossing unfolded elsewhere

Google underwent a Great Unbossing more than two decades ago and it didn't turn out great for them.

In 2002, they tried to have a flat organisational model, where engineering managers were fired to allow the workers to get on with their jobs.

The move only lasted a few months before Google realised the value of having managers around. But it wasn't all for nothing as the search engine launched Project Oxygen in 2009, according to the New York Times, which set about trying to find the attributes of the perfect manager.

Online shoe retailer Zappos embarked on a holacracy model in 2013, which involved no hierarchy or managers and relied upon the concept of self-management.

"That was a catastrophe," Houghton said. "They actually lost a lot of money that year, and they very quietly, put all their middle managers back.

"Without good managers, we have much less engaged teams. People don't get the development. They're not clear on the direction, they're not very good at prioritising, because they don't have a broader picture, so they just argue in their niches and their silos."

While it might not have stuck, it hasn't deterred pharmaceutical company Bayer from jumping on the trend recently.

CEO Bill Anderson revealed earlier this year plans to get rid of many middle managers and have workers manage themselves.

"We hire highly educated, trained people, and then we put them in these environments with rules and procedures and eight layers of hierarchy," he explained in an interview with Business Insider.

"Then we wonder why big companies are so lame most of the time... It's just too hard to get ideas approved, or you have to consult with so many people to make anything happen."

Bayer hasn't revealed how many managers will be cut, but the reorganisation is expected to save the German company about 2 billion euros.

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