Are You Overstaffed?
Not too long ago, I was sitting in a café working when I noticed a new chair being brought out.
What should have taken a minute turned into something else entirely.
One person placed it. Then another came over and shifted it slightly. They stepped back, looked at it, and before long, a couple more people had joined in. Suddenly, there were five or six people involved in deciding where this one chair should go.
I wish I were making this up, but I’m not.
It got moved a few times, talked about, adjusted again… and all up, it took about 20–25 minutes.
And even then, I’m fairly confident it’ll be moved again.
More people don’t always lead to a better outcome. You can start to guess what’s going on in situations like that. Maybe people are bored. Maybe there’s a bit of micromanaging. Maybe the process just isn’t clear.
If I could guess, it’s something much simpler. No one really owns the decision, so everyone feels like they need to be involved. Or people don’t feel confident making the call on their own, so it turns into a group exercise. Sometimes, there just isn’t enough meaningful work, so people stay busy with whatever’s in front of them.
Doing Things Doesn’t Mean You're Productive
The problem is, from the outside, it can look productive because everyone’s doing something. There’s movement, discussion, and effort, but if you step back and look at the outcome, nothing has really improved.
And that’s where businesses can get caught out because “busy” feels like progress.
This doesn’t just show up in small things like moving a chair. Instead, it shows up in decisions that take longer than they should, with work being checked multiple times, and too many people involved in simple tasks. Over time, it slows everything down.
What to actually do about it
This isn’t about cutting staff straight away. Instead, you need to define:
Who owns the decision?
What actually creates value?
And where should people be spending their time?
If everything requires multiple people to agree, you’ll keep getting the same outcome, which is slow decisions and a lot of wasted effort.
A good starting point is to look at your business and ask:
Where are simple decisions taking too long?
Where are multiple people involved when one would do?
And are your team focused on work that actually moves the business forward?
If you can simplify that and give people clear ownership and focus them on the right things, you usually don’t need more people.
You just need to use the ones you have better. At the end of the day, being busy isn’t the goal. Getting the right things done is.
And if it takes five people to decide where a chair goes, there’s a good chance the same thing is happening in more important parts of the business, too.
Hear the whole conversation here:
