Communications is Generally Good, Unless It Is Overhead

There is a good reason why work teams often are intentionally kept small: to get any work done at all, the amount of communications overhead has to be reduced. 

If you talk to people who work for large enterprises how much time they spend in meetings, many would say “almost all of my time.” Studies often find that senior managers spend at least half their time in meetings. Some estimate there are 56 million U.S. meetings each day. 

As the number of people you work with increases, communication overhead increases geometrically until the total percentage of time each individual must devote to group communication approaches 100 percent. 

After a certain threshold, each additional team member diminishes the capacity of the group to do anything other than communicate.

Large companies are slow because they suffer from communication overhead. “If you’re responsible for working with a group of more than five to eight people, at least 80 percent of your job will inevitably be communicating effectively with the people you work with,” argues Personal MBA.

That is one reason why some advocate meetings with no more than seven people. That is literally a rule of seven. 

Some might argue that is related to Miller's Law, which states that humans can only hold about seven items in short-term working memory. That is why Bell Labs designed U.S. phone numbers with seven digits. 

Likewise, span of control research suggests one person can only effectively and directly manage six people. That is why small teams are the building block of every military, and also applies to business “direct reports.”

That noted, work from home could have some impact on meeting length and frequency. Perhaps the good news is that meetings are shorter, if there are even more meetings to attend. 

Some research from Microsoft suggests the pandemic and dramatic increase in work from home has lead to more meetings that are shorter, suggesting many of those new shorter meetings were replacing informal communications that would have occurred in the office, but which are not possible when everyone is working remotely. 

The important point is that, as important as meetings are for communications and aligning group effort, they are, in effect, substitutes for actually accomplishing the organizational mission. “We can do meetings, or we can do work” might be a crude way of putting matters.