Establishing the right span of control in your organisation is essential to keep things running smoothly. When the span of control is too wide, employees risk feeling abandoned and managers struggle to monitor performance. When it’s too narrow, employees can feel micromanaged and inefficiencies multiply across the company.
Every company should therefore aim for a span of control that is ‘just right’ for them. It needs to enable high levels of efficiency and productivity and allow employees to develop without negatively impacting business operations.
The goal is simple, but getting there is a challenge. Let’s start by answering the most relevant question.
what is the ideal span of control for my company?
Unfortunately, the answer is — it depends. The ideal span of control (or span of management, as it’s sometimes known) depends on a multitude of different factors. They range from the complexity of employees’ daily tasks and their skill levels to the use of technology within the organisation. Even more hard-to-define factors like company culture and the leadership style in the chain of command play a part.
For that reason, it’s difficult to give an exact answer that applies to all companies. It’s OK to suggest relative scales like wide, narrow or balanced — for example, in a company where employee tasks are highly repetitive, a wide span of control may work well. However, setting a specific number is often misleading.
Even among companies in the same industry, small differences can cause the span of control benchmark to differ significantly.
While benchmarks are a mildly interesting data point, they are rarely if ever the answer to designing the right organisational context to get to both the desired cost structure and the right behaviors for business success.
Additionally, even if it was helpful to use a benchmark set by another company, simply mandating a new span of control in a top-down way is rarely a recipe for success. In order for the proposed organisational structure to have the positive effects you want, it has to reflect the reality of your employees and provide a balance between guidance and autonomy.
the importance of a balanced span of control
Identifying the right span of control for your organisation is a balancing act. Having a span of control that is too wide can create issues — but trying to solve them by simply turning employees into managers can create new problems, such as title inflation.
this table shows
a few examples of how problems can arise at both ends of the span of control spectrum
An ideal span of control provides a comfortable middle ground between these pairs of problems. For example, employees should have access to support and guidance when they need it while still having the autonomy to do their job independently. Similarly, teams should be small enough that managers have enough time to deal with every member — but not so small that managers have nothing to do.
