Insights
When Organisations Flatten, Managers Become the First Line of Employee Relations
I've found myself having the same conversation with leadership teams across different organisations.
The conversation rarely starts with employee relations. More often, it's about organisational design. Reducing layers, increasing spans of control, building a leaner operating model, creating more accountability, moving faster. Yet those conversations often lead me back to the same question:
Who is making people decisions now?
Across industries, now more than ever, companies are flattening structures, reducing management layers, increasing spans of control and redesigning support functions. Some of this is driven by cost pressure. Some by technology. Some by a genuine belief that simpler structures create better organisations.
The result is often a cleaner organisational chart and a more complex management job.
One thing I've noticed repeatedly is that when organisations flatten, employee relations work doesn't stay where it was. It moves. And it usually moves to the person least prepared to receive it.
There is a version of this argument that gets applied to HR specifically: leaner People teams mean fewer problems, less bureaucracy, more accountability sitting with managers where it belongs. Ryan Breslow, the CEO of Bolt, made this case publicly not long ago. I keep wondering, though, whether the problems have actually gone, or whether they have simply moved somewhere else in the organisation, sitting with managers and teams who are not always sure what to do with them.
Ten years ago, a manager dealing with a performance concern, workplace conflict or sensitive employee issue could often rely on several layers of support. There was often a senior manager nearby and an HR Business Partner closely aligned to the team. Today, many managers are leading larger teams with fewer layers above them and leaner People functions around them.
As a result, managers have become the primary point of judgement for many people-related decisions, not formal ER practitioners or employment lawyers. Managers.
They're deciding whether an issue is serious, whether a conversation needs documenting, whether HR should be involved and whether action is required at all. Most employee relations risk begins there.
How should I handle this situation? Is this a performance issue or something else? Should I be documenting this, even if the conversation was informal? Do I need support yet?
By the time Employee Relations becomes involved, expectations may already have been set, conversations may have gone undocumented and key decisions may already have shaped the eventual outcome. Formal ER processes often inherit the consequences of earlier management judgement.
When the org design conversation starts, the people questions often haven't
In some of the redesigns I've worked on, the proposed structure was largely complete before the employment implications had been considered. Reporting lines had been mapped, leadership roles assigned and the operating model agreed.
That's usually when I start asking different questions.
Have the proposed job levels been assessed? Have any title or level changes been reviewed with Reward and other relevant stakeholders? How will employees experience these changes? Could something that appears administrative from an organisational perspective be interpreted very differently by the employee affected, and, if so, possibly by local employment law as well?
I've worked with leadership teams that had thoroughly debated spans of control, reporting lines and cost, but had not yet considered whether role changes could trigger consultation requirements, contractual considerations or other employee relations obligations, sometimes across more than one jurisdiction at the same time.
Managers are making more of these calls than they used to. That is not a problem in itself. The question is whether they have what they need to do it well. And that question is worth asking before the redesign is complete, not after. In some cases the gap is capability or support. In others, managers are still carrying their full individual contributor workloads and the management accountability arrived without the time to exercise it. The answer varies. The question rarely gets asked.
European employment frameworks don't flatten with the org
I see this most clearly in international organisations. Leaders often believe they are implementing a single management approach across Europe. From an organisational perspective, that may be true. From an employment perspective, it rarely is. A manager may see one team, the organisation may see one business unit, but employment frameworks tend to maintain their own view of the world.
A manager leading employees across the Netherlands, Germany, Spain, Italy and the UK is navigating very different legal and employee relations environments while trying to solve what appears to be the same management problem. Works Council obligations in the Netherlands do not disappear because reporting lines changed. Consultation requirements in Germany do not become simpler because the organisation removed a layer of management. The disciplinary framework in Spain does not flex because the People team is smaller than it was two years ago.
I worked with a manager who redistributed responsibilities across a team as part of a broader redesign. From an organisational perspective, it was a straightforward change. What nobody had checked was whether it triggered a Works Council advice right in the Netherlands. The change had already been communicated by the time the obligation surfaced.
The manager had genuinely thought it through. They just didn't know what they didn't know.
And it's not only structural changes that create risk. A manager who reduces an employee's responsibilities during a reorganisation, even if pay remains unchanged, may be stepping into very different territory depending on the country involved. In some jurisdictions, that may require employee consent. In others, it may trigger procedural obligations or consultation requirements. The assumption that a pay-neutral role change carries little employment risk simply doesn't hold across many European frameworks.
The org chart may flatten. Employment obligations don't.
The harder-to-see risk: inconsistency
Beyond the structural and legal risk, there is another pattern I see more consistently. It is harder to see and harder to name.
Inconsistency.
Two managers can face almost identical situations and arrive at completely different outcomes. One documents concerns early and follows a structured process. Another relies entirely on informal conversations. A third delays action because they're unsure what to do and don't have immediate access to advice.
Each assigns their own assessment of urgency and priority. Each believes they're acting reasonably. Each creates a different employee experience.
The awareness varies. Some organisations are tracking this closely. Others discover the gap when a situation has already become difficult to reverse.
Over time, those differences become culture issues, employee relations issues and occasionally legal issues. In countries where employment frameworks are more protective, particularly France, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, Poland, Ireland, and Spain, those inconsistencies tend to surface more quickly. The UK is no exception, especially following recent changes to employment legislation.
The structure can change overnight. Judgement takes longer to build.
Organisations invest significant time redesigning structures. Far fewer spend the same amount of time thinking about where people-related judgement will sit once those changes are complete.
Every removed layer transfers decision-making responsibility somewhere else. Most often, it transfers it to managers. For many organisations, that is the intention. The question is whether manager capability, support and capacity have evolved at the same pace as the structure around them.
Perhaps that's why this topic keeps resurfacing in my work: the structure changes, the people questions don't go away, and I've yet to work with an organisation that regretted thinking about this earlier.
The chart can change overnight. Capability, judgement and confidence take much longer to build. The risk isn't having fewer layers. The risk is expecting managers to navigate increasingly complex people decisions without the layers, the proximity, or the support that used to exist around them.
Organisations can remove layers. They cannot remove judgement. And in flatter organisations, judgement may be one of the most important organisational capabilities of all.