German Company Is Getting Rid Of Bosses, Asks Workers To “Self-Organize”. Here’s Why

German pharmaceutical giant Bayer is facing a difficult time and is now making some structural changes, as per a report in Business Insider. The plan is to reduce corporate bureaucracy, provide employees greater autonomy, and enable the business to innovate effectively.

Chief Executive Officer Bill Anderson has named it the “Dynamic shared ownership.” “We hire highly educated, trained people, and then we put them in these environments with rules and procedures and eight layers of hierarchy. Then we wonder why big companies are so lame most of the time,” he said in an interview with Business Insider earlier this year. 

Mr Anderson said that employees, particularly those at major companies, have voiced concerns about this traditional structure as the organisational chart in a classic corporate context is arranged upwards, starting at the bottom and working its way up to the top. Bayer claims that they have a little under 100,000 workers.”People love the company; they love the sort of culture and the science and the commitment to patients, but they basically said: ‘Increasingly, we can’t get anything done. It’s just too hard to get ideas approved, or you have to consult with so many people to make anything happen,” he said.

The CEO said that he plans to cut the literal corporate rulebook. The company’s regulations run more than 1,300 pages. “That’s actually longer than ‘War and Peace’ and a lot less exciting,” he said. Mr Anderson also plans to cut middle managers and give employees flexibility in choosing projects. 

In New Jersey, some of the Bayer employees were given an idea about the new structure. Employees were arranged in a circle and given the chance to stand in the centre to pitch an idea, according to the report. Employees were asked to join their colleagues in the centre of the circle if they had an interest in their idea. “You’re going to self-organise,” a corporate trainer said during the session, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The number of managers that will be let go has not been made public by the firm. The WSJ claims that thousands of US-based managers will be reassigned to other jobs and that other functions will be terminated.

The German corporation stated in March that Mr Anderson’s proposal would reduce organisational expenses by around 2 billion euros. Bayer’s shares fell more than 50 per cent in the last year, from 60.40 euros to 27.64 euros. Notably, the business is managing debt of around 34 billion euros.