In 2024, Gartner forecasted that 20% of organizations would use AI to flatten their structures by 2026, eliminating more than half of existing middle-management roles. This shift places greater pressure on the remaining managers to absorb the teams and responsibilities previously overseen by others.
For instance, Meta’s newest applied engineering team is reportedly operating with a 50-to-1 employee-to-manager ratio. The growing disparity between employees and managers they report to has given rise to the term “megamanagers,” who are increasingly asked to do more with less; remaining accessible and providing real-time guidance to growing teams, while still managing their own responsibilities and workloads.
As these employees take on broader responsibilities and oversee increasingly large teams, their junior colleagues continue to rely on them for clarity. This shift is forcing employers to rethink how managers work and communicate, with the challenge being effective communication at scale without creating constant overload.
Scale Communication Without Increasing Meeting Load
If a manager has an overwhelming number of direct reports, the first move is to be surgical about cutting down unnecessary meetings and reducing redundancy. Once a team grows to dozens or hundreds of people, often spread across multiple time zones, traditional communication methods can feel contrived. Finding a 30-minute window to connect with a full team becomes a logistical challenge and can compromise individual deep work. This puts managers in a cycle of repeating the same updates, answering the same questions, and sitting in back-to-back sync meetings just to keep everyone on the same page.
Leaders should rethink how they deliver information. Utilizing asynchronous communication methods, whether that’s flipped meetings, Slack/Teams, or a quick video explainer, allows teams to leverage short updates to deliver flexible, low-friction knowledge sharing rather than defaulting to long email chains or live meetings. This allows employees to digest information and absorb updates entirely on their own schedules, affording them extra time to learn AI workflows and experiment with new deployments.
Our company-wide “Async-First Communication Month” proved that not every interaction needs to be a meeting, with 85% of our over 300-member staff saying they would consider replacing in-person meetings in the future. In this experiment, non-critical meetings were replaced with asynchronous communication. The initiative resulted in increased productivity and a greater appreciation for video communication in the workplace.
Managers do not need professional editing skills or high-end equipment to do this either. Simple, lightly produced recordings are often the most effective for internal communication. Webcam videos can help maintain personal connections during announcements or team recognition, while screen recordings work well for technical walkthroughs where the information itself is the priority.
To ensure alignment, managers should establish expectations and deadlines for reviewing important updates. At the same time, live meetings should remain reserved for situations that genuinely require discussion or decision-making, such as brainstorming sessions, problem-solving, or one-on-one coaching.
Create Consistent Employee Onboarding
As organizations restructure and roles evolve, onboarding becomes one of the most time-consuming responsibilities for managers. It can also be inconsistent, with the quality often dependent on how much time a trainer has available on a given day. This variability can create gaps in knowledge and slow employee ramp-up.
Recording standard processes, department overviews, and software tutorials helps solve this challenge. Once a walkthrough is recorded, it becomes a repeatable training asset that can be used across multiple onboarding cycles. Employees entering similar roles receive a consistent introduction to team workflows, expectations, and tools, regardless of when they join.
This process traditionally would add a lot more work, but the maturation of AI has made the ROI worth it. AI can support nearly every stage of video creation. For training videos, AI avatars and voices help streamline production by providing consistency across content, eliminating the need for on-camera talent, complex filming setups, or repeated voiceover recordings. AI voices also make it easy to update narration without re-recording.
A 2025 study comparing AI and human-led training videos showed that 92% of participants agreed that clear, warm, and polished voices improve attention regardless of whether the voice is human or AI. Viewers prioritized audio quality over the source of the narration. The study also found that AI avatars were more effective when used in picture-in-picture layouts rather than full-screen. While 72% of participants rated videos with smaller avatars as high quality, that figure dropped to 55% for full-screen avatars, where viewers were more likely to notice robotic behaviors such as lip-sync issues and unnatural facial movements.
As organizations scale training with AI, maintaining trust remains essential. The study also found that many learners could not distinguish between high-quality AI and human voices, making transparency an important consideration. By balancing innovation with credibility, L&D teams can use AI to create scalable, consistent, and engaging training experiences while preserving learner trust.
This approach not only accelerates onboarding but also allows megamangers to remain focused on workload priorities rather than repeatedly delivering the same presentations. Housing these resources in a centralized video library also enables employees to revisit training materials whenever they need a refresher, reinforcing learning over time.
Build a Self-Service Knowledge Base
Beyond onboarding, video can play a critical role in preserving knowledge. As teams become larger and more distributed, documenting processes becomes essential to maintaining efficiency and continuity. When new workflows are created or recurring problems are solved, managers can record a brief screen walkthrough to explain the process.
Modern video tools can automatically transcribe recordings and organize them into chapters, making information easier to find. Instead of interrupting a manager or colleague for help, employees can search the library, navigate directly to the relevant section, and quickly find the information they need. This self-service approach reduces repetitive questions, preserves organizational knowledge, and enables managers to focus their attention where it adds the most value.
As managers oversee larger teams with fewer layers of supervision, video can help them communicate more effectively at scale, extending their reach without adding to their workload. By enabling consistent communication, repeatable onboarding, and accessible knowledge sharing, video allows managers to support more employees while spending less time on repetitive tasks.
Amy Casciotti is the Vice President of Human Resources at TechSmith.
Photo courtesy Getty Images for Unsplash+
