Empowering middle managers with decision intelligence to reduce burnout

By: Vishal Ranjan

Much of what decides how an employee’s week goes gets settled one level up, by the person they report to. A leave request here, a call on which client gets attention first there, or whether a slip in the monthly numbers needs a chat now or can wait until after the close. 

In Indian companies that person is usually a middle manager, and the pile on their desk has grown as firms bring in new technology and rework how their teams are set up.

Two findings from this year’s workplace research have stayed with me. Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace 2026 report found that only 30 per cent of managers in India were engaged at work in 2025, down from 39 per cent a year earlier. 

The second comes from ManpowerGroup’s Global Talent Barometer 2026, which surveyed workers in 19 countries. In India, it found middle managers to be the group most likely to find meaning in their work, and also among the most stressed.

That second figure tells me these are people who like what they do. In my view, when committed employees report high stress, the cause lies in the shape of the job rather than in any lack of motivation.

And the part of the job weighing heaviest is the sheer number of calls managers are expected to make.

Take a reimbursement claim or a change in the weekly roster. On its own each takes very little time. The trouble is that they keep arriving, one after another, and nearly every one has some small detail somebody has to verify first.

Microsoft’s Work Trend Index team put a number on this last year. Looking at activity data for the users who get pinged the most, it counted roughly 275 meetings, emails and chat messages landing in a single day.

Over core hours, that worked out to a fresh interruption about every two minutes. One in three people Microsoft surveyed said the pace of work over the past five years had made it impossible to keep up. Plenty of those pings, I suspect, end with a question only the manager can answer.

Under that kind of pressure, managers start cutting corners in quite human ways. They send up questions they could have answered themselves or put a decision off until tomorrow while the team sits waiting. Both habits wear people down all the same.

People use the term decision intelligence quite freely these days. My own working definition is a modest one. Take a decision the business makes again and again, settle how it ought to be made, give it the data it needs, and go back every so often to see whether the outcomes hold up.

The first place a manager notices this is the small stuff. A travel claim well within policy limits, for instance, probably does not need a manager to open it at all. If the company fixes the limits beforehand, that claim can be cleared automatically. The same goes for a regular stock reorder, or two staff members with the same training swapping shifts. Only when something seems off does it reach the manager.

Board members in India seem to be thinking along similar lines. Between May and June this year, Gallup and the Institute of Directors (India) surveyed 181 directors and senior leaders. Four in ten wanted companies to use technology to simplify work, and the same share wanted processes made simpler. Their joint report recommends that low-value approvals be scrapped, and that firms look hard at which routines eat up manager time for little return.

Most organisations answer a manager’s request for better information by building a dashboard. Quite often, though, a dashboard just means the manager ends up with another screen to log into, and is still the one pulling numbers out of two or three systems and matching them up before making a call.

It works better when the information arrives with the decision. Someone reviewing a request for an extra hire should be able to see the team’s workload trend, attrition risk and remaining budget on the same screen as the request.

Gallup’s research on team size found that talented managers who are well supported can lead much larger teams without their engagement falling. Among the support it lists are access to useful data and the authority to act on it.

It is hard to think of anything more draining than knowing exactly what needs fixing and having to wait for sign-off from two levels up. So any organisation serious about this has to spell out who decides what, how far their authority stretches, and where a decision goes once it crosses that line.

Then there is the question of skill. According to Gallup, only 44 per cent of managers worldwide say they have received management training, and those who have are half as likely to be actively disengaged. Data skills are a big part of what is missing. Systems will increasingly suggest an answer, and the manager has to decide whether it fits the situation in front of them. After that comes the harder bit, explaining the decision to a team that may not have much faith in the numbers.

I am not suggesting companies drop wellness initiatives, flexible hours or counselling. They just tend to do more good when the everyday workload is under control.

If I were advising an HR head on a first step, it would be a modest one. Choose a few managers from different teams and ask them to jot down every decision they take for a fortnight. Some entries could be handled by a rule. Some were hard only because the right information was missing. Others genuinely needed a person’s judgement. Hand off the first kind, fix the data behind the second, and guard the time managers have for the third.

Middle managers are clearly invested in their work. Helping them spend more of the day on decisions that actually need them is a sensible place for any organisation to start.