Now here's an idea!

Throughout my career, I invariably worked for organizations that were in perpetual reorgnization mode. The word "reorganize" was always used, but one colleague observed that it wasn't quite the right word, as "reorganized" would imply that the company was organized to begin with. Which was seldom (never?) the case.

In one company, with a re-org looming, the managers tasked us rank and file workers with coming up with suggestions for how our group - a 100 person outpost of a larger organization - should be set up. Permission granted to officially do what we'd been doing all day anyway, i.e., sitting around speculating on how the re-org was going to go down, my buddies and I happily commandeered a meeting room and spent the workday with a little set of cards we'd created - one with each employee's name on it - laying out possible organization structures. 

I can't remember if we ever submitted a suggested org, and, if we did, whether anything came of it. I also don't remember if this was the reorganization when I overheard my boss and another manager debating who would get me on his team. My boss wanted to keep me, if only because everyone wanted to bail out of his group and join that other manager's team and he wanted to keep at least some sort of respectable headcount under him. 

My boss' argument for keeping me wasn't that I was so great. On the contrary, as I clearly overheard, he was telling the other manager - who ran the group of financial consultants where all my buds were heading - "she doesn't know anything about finance." Which was mostly true, yet still.

Anyway, I ended up staying under my original boss. I liked him well enough, even though he was something of a stiff. Case in point: one year when it came to reviews, HR told all the managers that the vast majority of employees - as near as possible to 100% - should be rated a "3," and that only the most exceptional should be rated a "4" or a "5." My goody-two-shoes boss gave us all "3's." Every other manager gave their peeps "4's" or "5's." 

Although the party line was always that raises and reviews are decoupled - hah! - when the raises came down, all the "4's" and "5's" got good raises, while us "3's" got a pittance.

This stroll down re-org/de-org lane was prompted by an article I'd seen (from Fortune, as picked up by Yahoo) on a pretty radical step that Bayer took: it got rid of its managers and let the rank and filers organize themselves.

Things have not been going well for Bayer for a while now. 

The company has a colossal amount of debt. In 2024, its maket cap plummeted. The company - known for that life saving, health preserving miracle we call the aspirin - had paid a boatload to acquire Monsanto - better known for death-dealing products like the weed killer Roundup. With the acquisition of Monsanto, Bayer also acquired a boatload of lawsuits claiming that Roundup causes cancer. (Personal aside: my husband's wonderful Aunt Ruth worked for years for Monsanto, and died, not young-young, but relatively so, from a cancer related to the products she had worked on.) On top of everything else, Bayer's patent for its blood-clot medication, Xarelto, expires next year, opening the door for competitors and closing the window on unbridled profits. 

With lots of not such good stuff going on, why not fire the managers? After all, so many of them are nothing more than paper-shuffling bureaucrats, no? (Not that I was ever a paper-shuffling bureaucrat of a manager...)

In place of managers, Bayer got rid of annual budgets and asked staff to organize themselves into 90-day “sprints” in self-directed teams. Anderson promised the vast majority of his staff would be operating under this model by the end of 2024.

“Rather than a lumbering corporation, Bayer will emerge as agile and bold as a startup—but one with operations in more than 100 countries. I’m convinced that this dramatic change will accelerate and unlock the value creation in each of our businesses,” Anderson wrote in a commentary piece for Fortune in March.

The good news for Bayer is that, when it comes to employees that Bayer does not want to attrit, attrition is down. Which is a good thing - between recruiting, onboarding, time to effectiveness, training, it costs a lot more to bring in someone new than it is to retain the services of someone you want to keep - but may not be enough to get Bayer fully back on track.

Still, eliminating the managerial layer - except, obviously, in the upper echelons - is an interesting approach. Mid-level managers have been under the gun since forever, but now, if the Bayer approach takes off, it looks like there's even more reason for those middies to make sure that they're working managers, not just paper-shuffling budgeters; "3," "4," and "5" review conductors; powermongers hell bent on keeping folks in their fiefdoms. 

Caveat, managers! (Take two aspirins and call us in the morning.)