Laura Stack* says there is an optimum number of members for a team doing a particular project — too many and productivity slumps.
While it’s true that two heads are often better than one, too many heads is a recipe for poor productivity.
Indeed, it is possible to over collaborate, but where’s the sweet spot of just right?
For some things, the number may be one. For other tasks, it may be 10.
Decades of business research, however, puts the number somewhere between two and seven, with an average of 4.6.
If your team lacks enough to do, it’s most likely too big.
What are some other indicators that your team is too large?
Keep these factors in mind:
What are you trying to accomplish?
For some tasks, many hands make light work.
If you’re painting a building or harvesting a field, the more hands, the faster you finish.
As tasks become smaller or more specialised, we see the opposite effect.
Everyone wants to contribute, but in trying to do so, they get in each other’s way and add so many different ingredients.
These can be based on their personal concepts of what the final product should be like.
As a result it takes forever to finish.
When you do, the final product might not resemble the initial plans at all and might be a mishmash of imperfection.
The intricacy of inter-team communication:
As a team increases in size, the amount of communication tends to explode.
This is because the number of links or points of contact (POCs) increases exponentially.
You have a POC with every person in the group, and each of them has a POC with you and all the others.
Even in a relatively small group, the number of interactions grows quickly.
This may explain the famous quote from the Chief Executive of Amazon, Jeff Bezos: “Communication is terrible.”
How many pizzas it takes to feed the team:
Speaking of Mr Bezos, he invented the Two-Pizza Rule.
According to him, your team should be small enough to feed with two large pizzas.
Let’s call his number five-to-eight.
The Ringelmann Effect:
Based on studies of tug-of-war teams, in 1913 French agricultural engineer, Maximilien Ringelmann reported that the more people were involved in a task, the lower the individual effort.
Many other researchers have confirmed this phenomenon, which became known as the Ringelmann Effect.
According to Mr Ringelmann, maximum effort peaked at five-to-six people.
Larger teams might have greater overall productivity than smaller teams, but many of the members slack off more.
Some put in minimal effort — now called social loafing.
Take a look. How many of your team members are loafing?
Decision-making difficulty:
The more people in your group, the harder it can become to make a decision.
Even deciding where to go for lunch can be a pain for a large group.
Consensus decisions become especially difficult as the number goes up.
Even if you base your decisions on a vote or the manager makes the decision, you’ll want to debate all the options first.
Conversely, if the team remains small, decision-making is usually much easier.
If the members of your work team are bored, get in each other’s way more than they help each other, or there’s too much social loafing, you have a few options.
You can try to increase engagement, decrease the size of the team as a whole, or split into sub-teams, focusing on specific tasks.
Most workers would choose the latter; not just because most of us aren’t managers, but because it works if taken seriously and organised well.
Any team can decide to do it if the manager allows, and it immediately reins in most problems.
If management handles the problem, the quickest route may involve disposing of redundant workers.
Sometimes the remaining workers can accomplish just as much, if not more.
If management doesn’t want to downsize, there are alternate solutions.
These include moving extra workers to other teams in need of them, splitting big teams into smaller ones, or allowing attrition to decrease the headcount through retirement or resignation.
Any of these methods can work, if handled thoughtfully.
*Laura Stack is a speaker, author and authority on productivity and performance who has written seven books, including Doing the Right Things Right: How the Effective Executive Spends Time. She can be contacted at theproductivitypro.com
This article first appeared on Laura’s website.
