Flattening Meta’s hierarchy became an obsession for Mark Zuckerberg, proclaiming 2023 as “the year of efficiency” and 2024 as the year of consolidation of that structure without so many intermediate positions. This model has become popular, with some cases in which it has gone to the extreme: titles have been eliminated and even bosses have been dispensed with.
Meta was one of those companies that considerably increased its workforce during the pandemic. In fact, statements from some of those newly hired revealed that many of them had been hired only to prevent the competition from doing so.
The result was a hyper-hierarchical template that meant that making any decision had to go through too many filters until reaching the person who should make it. In short: inefficiency.
Mark Zuckerberg took out the scissors and began a wave of layoffs among middle management to reduce the number of layers between the problem and who should make the decision. The concept has subsequently been adopted by other large technology companies such as Amazon or Google, which seek to move quickly in decision-making, in the face of a scenario of maximum competitiveness generated by the development of AI.
Horizontal organization: without titles or bosses
In his search for that hierarchical simplificationsome companies have chosen to eliminate the titles of their positions, democratizing decision-making and organizing the company by departments (horizontal), not by layers (vertical).
A few days ago, Victoria Weller, from the operations team of ElevenLabsa company dedicated to the development of AI, had in an article of Sifted that they had eliminated the job titles of all their employees.
In this way, no one was anymore vice president, director or manager You were welcome and they simply belonged to a certain department, but they could openly collaborate with other departments when the project required it, without needing the approval of a boss or coordinator.
As Weller said, “Job titles can be a distraction. They divert attention from the results of the work (generating the best ideas and executing them quickly) and reduce our ability to shift focus flexibly.”
Victoria Weller said that “the goal of the organizational change was to get our team to ask ‘where do I have the biggest impact right now?’, rather than ‘how can I become the boss of X?'” That is, put the resolution of the projects at the center and not so much individualism to achieve a promotion in your career.
In a message fromLuke Harries, another member of the ElevenLabs team, highlighted this peculiarity of his company. He pointed out that no one had bombastic titles to describe their position, highlighting that what counts are the ideas, not the position held by the person proposing them.
In his message, Harries attached the job offers that the company currently has open and, indeed, in them Job title not found for which you are applying, but also describes the department (engineering, commercial, financial, customer support, etc.)
Tap on the image to go to the original message
In Spain there are also: Indaero
We don’t have to go to Silicon Valley to find companies with that horizontal structure that dispenses with bosses and positions. In an interview with A Salmon PodcastDarío González, (former) CEO of the Sevillian Indaerosaid that one of the conditions for the Krisos investment fund invest in his supply company for the aeronautical industry was that hierarchical positions will be eliminated. Including his role as CEO of the company his father founded.
In the case of this SME based in Alcalá de Guadaíra, all strategic decisions and management of the organization are assumed by the entire workforce. These decisions include the salary allocation of employees, which is public information among employees and is limited: the highest salaries cannot exceed 2.5 times the amount of the lowest.
In his interview, Darío González acknowledged being the first to be surprised by the good results with the new management model. “We earn more money and workers are happier and more productive because they are involved in their work and are responsible for it.”
“At first it is scary because there is a bit of confusion. There were employees who did not feel important and now had decision-making capacity and others who did have that power and could no longer use it,” said González. “When it comes to making decisions, and due to the experience I have, my proposals are listened to more, but when it comes to making a decision I do not impose my criteria or my rules, but rather it is a system of representatives who make the decisions. decisions.”
As González assured, now employees must take on some responsibilities about their employment, since they do not limit themselves to obeying what a boss imposes on them. “In traditional companies, there is a small management team that is very motivated, and many employees who are very little motivated. When you get everyone hooked on the philosophy and the company, you get productivity to increase,” said the former CEO.
Not everything has been success in this model
The title or boss elimination model is not always a guarantee of success. The newspaper archive leaves us with some cases in which companies of different kinds have had to return to the “traditional” hierarchy system.
GitHub can be a good example of it. In 2008, it was founded based on a flat structure in which there were no bosses due to the conviction of its founders. However, in 2016, the company was forced to abandon that structure. Medium also faced many challenges to maintain his “holacracy” because “it was getting in the way of work.”
In Buffer too they recognizedthat “We did it wrong” and they did not know how to apply the self-management model in their internal structure. The multinational footwear company Zappos lost almost a third of its employees after announcing to them that they either assumed responsibility for self-management or could leave.
In Xataka | To start working at Meta we will have to follow the example of Mark Zuckerberg’s daughter: fewer titles and more skills
Image | Unsplash (Redd Francisco)
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