Part three in the Simia series: The Unsaid Truths of Organisational Life. A bold, honest series lifting the lid on silence, confusion, and cultural contradictions. Based on our programmes run in the ASEAN region with over 3300 leaders and staff in the past 18 months, this article discusses the recurrence of “right-sizing” in companies, and how it can impact your team.
Amazon has cut over 27,000 jobs since late 2022 and is now signalling further reductions as it turns its focus on artificial intelligence (Techgig). Meanwhile, Malaysia’s state-energy giant PETRONAS is in the process of reducing about 10 % of its workforce, about 5,000 people (The Edge) . Across the world, organisations are announcing layoffs in the thousands. Tech giants, energy companies, banks, and even public institutions are “streamlining”, “re-calibrating”, or “right-sizing.”
This euphemism “right-sizing”, implies precision, as if an organisation suddenly becomes correct once people are removed. It’s a term that sanitises the human impact of redundancy while signalling to investors that the company is acting rationally. But behind the language lies a deeper cultural problem: many organisations have confused being efficient with being effective.
The Mirage of Efficiency
In recent months, working with corporate clients, we have seen a growing tension inside companies grappling with new systems, performance frameworks, and AI integration. Leaders are under pressure to prove measurable gains; staff are under pressure to adapt, often with little clarity on what success now looks like.
We are seeing new performance systems that promise objectivity and transparency, which largely deliver, yet the shift has come with an unintended consequence: people feeling reduced to metrics. Qualitative contributions, collaboration, and creativity became harder to measure and therefore harder to value. Morale dips, trust wavers, and leaders find themselves spending more time defending systems, rather than developing people.
The drive for efficiency, with clearer systems, sharper KPIs, and more automation, creates an illusion of control while quietly eroding the human infrastructure that makes performance possible.
Is AI the Villain?
It’s tempting to blame artificial intelligence for these shifts. It’s visible, measurable, and politically convenient to frame as the disruptor. But AI is only the accelerant. The real disruption comes from how leaders respond to it. A point we raised earlier this year on the Human Impact of A.I.
In our programmes across the region, staff repeatedly express fear of being left behind or replaced by technology. But they also demonstrate huge appetite for learning, adaptation, and contribution. They don’t resist change, they resist being excluded from it.
Leaders, on the other hand, often know exactly what good leadership should look like: communicating clearly, coaching effectively, and maintaining trust through uncertainty. Yet they struggle to practise these behaviours when the environment is dominated by deadlines, dashboards, and investor expectations. AI exposes this gap, not between humans and machines, but between knowledge and behaviour.
The organisations that navigate AI successfully are those that treat it as a partner, not a scapegoat. They invest in psychological safety, clarity, and competence, ensuring people feel trusted enough to experiment and learn. Efficiency may deliver faster output, but trust delivers sustained performance. Can we make the term right-sizing mean staff engagement and development; not more profit for stakeholders?
The False Promise of “Right-Sizing”
“Right-sizing” is not new language (we can see the movement from ‘firing’ to ‘down-sizing’ to ‘right-sizing’ from the 80s into the 90s), but it’s gaining traction again because it offers a moral shortcut, it suggests that whatever remains after layoffs is somehow the correct shape of the company. Yet this framing assumes that humans are liabilities rather than assets, cost centres rather than creators of value.
Our data tell a different story. In recent leadership programmes, participants identified morale, trust, and fairness as the primary risks to performance, not headcount or cost. They linked psychological safety directly to innovation and engagement. Groups also mapped the visible link between communication breakdowns and commercial losses, a reminder that most organisational waste doesn’t come from broken systems, but from disconnected people.
When companies prioritise right-sizing over right-leading, they may fix the balance sheet in the short term but weaken the ecosystem that sustains long-term performance. AI can automate tasks, but it cannot repair the cultural damage of silence, fear, and disconnection.
The Human Dividend
There’s a quieter revolution available to organisations right now: one that starts not with automation, but with alignment. Staff and leaders alike want the same things, clarity, fairness, and a sense that their contribution matters. The evidence is clear: when people feel heard, trusted, and supported, performance rises. When they feel disposable, it drops. Think about you…when you felt your manager or director supported you, how did you react? As for me, with a recent Director, any business challenges were secondary, I knew he had my back and I never considered looking elsewhere…until he left.
The organisations that will thrive in this new era are those that see people as their most adaptive technology. They invest in conversations, not just conversions; in learning systems, not just operating systems. They understand that the future of work isn’t about reducing humans, but re-humanising work itself.
So, the next time a CEO announces a round of right-sizing, it’s worth asking a simple question: Right for who?
Because if we keep calling layoffs “right-sizing,” we may eventually believe that the right size of an organisation is one without humanity, and by then, even the machines won’t be able to fix it.