“Yes, It’s Very Seinfeld-Ish”: Employee Shares How Their Company Seemingly Just Forgot About Their Existence

The bigger the organization, the messier it can become. And a recent post on the famous r/antiwork subreddit by user u/jerichomega perfectly illustrates just how ridiculously inefficient large corporate structures are.

He has shared his experience of being employed by a major property owner but not being given any responsibilities to do for over half a year now.

At one point, he even started looking for someone — anyone — that could use him, but nobody seems to care. Even though they are paying him.

While not as extreme, similar stories aren't uncommon. According to Ron Carucci, who is the co-founder and managing partner at Navalent, a company that works with CEOs and executives pursuing transformational change for their organizations and leaders, four of the most common irritants he's seen arise as a result of ineffective organization design are competing priorities, unwanted turnover, cross-functional rivalry, and inaccessible bosses.

In u/jerichomega's case, the latter seems to be the most evident. "Too often, when employee surveys return low scores for metrics like 'my manager is available when I need them,' people assume it's because of a time management issue or because leaders don't make an effort to meet with their direct reports," Carucci explained in Harvard Business Review. "When this happens, managers are given canned tools that tell them how to hold more effective one-on-one meetings or better prioritize their tasks. Training on empathy may get added to the leadership curriculum. Coaches may even get hired. But, in reality, this issue tends to reach far beyond individual leadership practices."

In fact, this was the case in one organization Carucci himself had worked with. "Their employees complained that they never had enough feedback or direction from their leaders. Leaders, by contrast, complained they had to work through too many layers above them to get decisions made or secure resources, and had too many direct reports below them to give each enough time. The average middle manager had 12-18 direct reports."

"The organization, like many others, treated spans of control as badges of honor to 'stretch' leaders — the more direct reports, they philosophized, the more important you must be."

However, for teams to run effectively, the number of layers within a hierarchy and the number of direct reports on a leader's team must be determined based on two factors: the type of work people are doing and the amount of coordination that work requires. "Highly complex or high-risk work — such as scientists running clinical drug trials or analysts interpreting sensitive data — often requires extensive coordination to execute effectively. Therefore, it makes sense to keep a manager’s span narrow to ensure high-quality performance. Standard, more repetitive work — such as engineers writing technical code or teams working on manufacturing lines — typically enables employees to be more autonomous, which allows a manager’s span to be wider," Carucci said.

When these nuances are overlooked, a manager's accessibility can become severely constrained. Or, as we just saw, even non-existent.