Mark Zuckerberg recently predicted a future where companies operate with drastically smaller teams—a shift that leaves HR leaders grappling with a critical question: when fewer people are expected to do more, what happens to the employee experience?
New research from HiBob highlights this reality, showing that 75% of decision-makers expect moderate AI proficiency to become standard for non-technical roles by 2028. But as AI handles routine tasks, roles are expanding, team sizes are shrinking, and day-to-day interactions are becoming less frequent.
To navigate these shifting expectations, HR leaders must rethink culture, support, and career progression in a flatter corporate landscape.
“A leaner organization shouldn’t mean a smaller employee experience,” says Macaire Montini, VP of People & Cutlure at HiBob. “If anything, flatter organizations require us to get much better at showing people how they can continue to grow even when there isn’t another rung on the ladder immediately above them. That means creating room for breadth, specialization, greater complexity, and different forms of leadership.
“I think the organizations that get this right will stop measuring careers primarily by how quickly someone moves upward,” she continued. “They’ll create environments where people can build careers that get broader, deeper, and more valuable over time.”
In this week’s HR Query, Montini addresses whether “doing more with less” is the new standard, and how organizations can keep career growth realistic—and human—as teams shrink.
Here’s what she had to say.
What happens when leaner teams mean broader roles?
Broader roles can actually create really interesting career opportunities—if we’re intentional about them.
For a long time, we’ve talked about careers as ladders: you become good at one job, get promoted into the next one, and eventually become a manager. But in leaner organizations, careers can look much more like a mushroom. You build a strong foundation of skills and experience, and then your career starts to widen. You might deepen your expertise, move across different parts of the business, take on greater complexity, mentor others, lead projects, or eventually manage people.
That kind of breadth can be incredibly valuable. The danger is when “broader role” simply becomes shorthand for doing three jobs instead of one.
Leaders should be able to articulate what an employee is gaining from additional responsibility: What new capability are they building? What greater complexity are they learning to hold? How does this experience increase their options for what comes next?
That’s where managers become incredibly important. Their job isn’t simply to distribute more work. It’s to help employees connect the work they’re doing today to the career they’re building over time.
How do you maintain culture when there are fewer people and less day-to-day interaction?
When organizations get leaner, culture becomes less about the number of interactions people have and more about the quality and meaning of those interactions. People need to understand how they fit into the organization: what they contribute, what they’re learning, where they have autonomy, and where they can go from here. That sense of connection is an important part of culture.
And that doesn’t require everyone to experience the organization in exactly the same way. Especially in global companies, local teams need room to develop their own identity and ways of working while still feeling connected to a shared foundation.
Managers are the connective tissue in all of this. They help employees make sense of change, understand expectations, navigate opportunities and see how their work connects to something larger. So when organizations become leaner, investing in managers isn’t an extra people initiative. It’s part of the infrastructure that allows a lean organization to work.
Could “doing more with less” become the new expectation?
In many organizations, it already has. But I don’t think “doing more with less” is a particularly useful aspiration. I’d rather think about how we enable people to do more with more—more technology, more information, more autonomy, more skills and more ability to focus their time where they create the most value.
AI creates a real opportunity here. If technology removes administrative work, the goal shouldn’t automatically be to fill every newly available hour with more tasks. Some of that capacity should allow people to take on more meaningful work, develop new capabilities and operate at a higher level of complexity. That’s especially important for career development. Technology may remove pieces of jobs, but it can also create space for jobs to become richer.
At HiBob, we think technology should amplify people. The real measure of efficiency isn’t simply whether fewer people can produce the same output. It’s whether people have greater capacity to do work that requires judgment, creativity, relationships and human decision-making.
How should HR rethink employee growth, engagement and support as teams shrink?
I think we need to rethink the mental model of career growth itself. The traditional career ladder assumes that growth means moving upward into progressively bigger titles, often eventually into people management. But organizations are getting flatter, and there simply aren’t enough management positions for that model to work for everyone. More importantly, not everyone wants to manage people.
That’s why I like to think about careers as mushrooms rather than ladders.
Early in a career, you’re building the stalk: developing foundational skills, learning the business and becoming consistently good at your craft. As you gain experience, the career can begin to widen. You can take on different customer segments, products, geographies or areas of expertise. You can become a mentor, lead increasingly complex work, move into an adjacent discipline, deepen as a specialist or choose people leadership.
The point is that progression doesn’t have to mean promotion, and growth doesn’t have to mean management. For HR, that means helping organizations make those pathways visible. Managers should understand what their employees are interested in building toward and be able to identify experiences—not just future job openings—that help them get there.
That also changes the career conversation. Instead of asking only, “What role do you want next?” we can ask, “What do you want to become capable of next?” That’s a much more useful question in a lean organization.