Sign up to receive weekly emails with our latest posts. Subscribe RSS Feed. Recent Posts. Have more levels of reporting in the organization, resulting in a more heirarchical organization Supervisors can spend time with employees and supervise them more closely Creates more development, growth, and advancement opportunities.
More expensive high cost of management staff, office, etc. More supervisory involvement in work could lead to less empowerment and delegation and more micromanagement Tends to result in communication difficulties and excessive distance between the top and bottom levels in the organization. Have fewer levels of reporting in the organization, resulting in a more flexible, flatter organization Ideal for supervisors mainly responsible for answering questions and helping to solve employees problems Encourages empowerment of employees by giving more responsibility, delegation and decision-making power to them.
Tends to result in greater communication efficiencies and frequent exposure to the top level of the organization May lead to overloaded supervisors if employees require much task direction, support, and supervision May not provide adequate support to employees leading to decreased morale or job satisfaction.
If employees have been in their jobs a long time, the work is easily understood or there is little variation in the type of work, a larger span of control is possible. For example, the information technology department at a large corporation may have one manager over 20 programmers who all do similar work on existing systems, but one HR systems manager may only have four people working on a new time-keeping and payroll system because of the complexity, testing and meetings involved.
The work performed should dictate the management-to-staff ratio, not a companywide formula. Technologically complicated processes may require a smaller management ratio since there is a greater need for interaction and coaching. But, a call center doing low-level tasks at the same company could have a to-1 ratio since the manager wouldn't get involved in most calls. For example, a factory with hundreds of employees assembling products could have a high ratio and fewer managers to oversee more employees since the staff would largely do the same thing and individual progress doesn't need to be reviewed regularly because of the limited interaction.
Virtual workplaces and geographic distance also allow for higher ratios. Managers are not spending a lot of time training and coaching teams that work autonomously and everyone enjoys access to the information they need to get work done.
Larger ratios are best when managers are experienced and comfortable in their position. They need to be clear in their directions, to reduce one-on-one time with so many employees, and good at cutting through roadblocks.
Managers with larger spans need to be speedy decision makers. If you have promoted a fairly new leader into the CEO role, on the other hand, you may still want to limit their span of control for the first few years. The final element in determining the ideal ratio of direct reports to managers is to evaluate how dynamic the work or market environment is.
As a rough rule, the more dynamic things are, the narrower the span of control should be. For example, if you operate in the tech industry, where new products are coming out monthly or even weekly, you risk overloading your managers by having too many people reporting to them. The opposite is true, of course, if you work in a very predictable and stable environment. The pervasive availability of technology has allowed managers to increase their span of control because the tools allow more information flow.
There isn't a need for regular update meetings with you use a strategy deployment tool like Khorus to keep every project updated. This includes extending to remote employees that the manager might rarely see face-to-face. So highly technology enabled firms can operate with a larger span of control. So, when it comes to designing your organization and deciding on the optimum span of control, you can start with the book number of seven. But a more thoughtful approach will be to modify that number based on these five variables to see what your magic number really is.
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