Lean Organizations Are More Productive

Good organizations and leaders work hard to provide the necessary resources to accomplish great outcomes. 

Chief among the choices and considerations about resources is the decision regarding how many team members it takes to get things done. 

Within every function, business, or team, the level of staffing has a tremendous influence on productivity, motivation, and effectiveness. Getting the staff and workforce number “right” is of crucial importance. 

Organizations and teams that are understaffed place an unnecessary burden on team members. Without enough colleagues and experts to accomplish what needs to be done, team members often feel overwhelmed and stressed out. 

As a result, job satisfaction plummets, work quality suffers, safety protocols are ignored, and customer service drops off a cliff. Not surprisingly, team member turnover is much higher in severely understaffed organizations. 

In contrast, overstaffed and heavily resourced teams experience a much different set of negative consequences. In addition to runaway costs, inefficiency, and waste become commonplace, individual productivity crashes, and team members often believe they are unrecognized for quality work. Turnover in organizations that are overstaffed is also higher than normal. 

Organizations and leaders walk a fine line in attempting to maintain the ideal number of team members in each area to achieve the highest productivity and satisfaction. 

Because the dangers of overstaffing and understaffing are well-known, most organizations establish a philosophy of staffing that reflects their view of people and what motivates and demotivates them. 

The best organizations commonly land on the view that lean workforces are the most productive, engaged, and satisfied, and they aim to maintain a set of lean teams and functions. 

The idea of a “lean” team or organization originated in manufacturing with attempts to optimize efficiency and promote self-organization. As a metaphor, however, it more commonly stands for an organization that slightly understaffs as compared to competitors or traditional views. A lean team or organization typically has slightly fewer people getting the same work done as compared to industry standards. 

Research confirms that lean teams and organizations have more focus, get more done, aggressively eliminate waste, streamline processes, and produce higher-quality work. 

Lean teams also foster a stronger sense of camaraderie as everyone pulls together to achieve common and shared goals. Slightly understaffed teams attract scrappy and hungry team members who want to be accountable and recognized for the quality work they produce.  

Some of the most successful and well-known organizations in history have a record of operating with slightly fewer people than their competitors. They do so intentionally, not by hiring fewer people or combining roles, but by being reluctant to add staff in any area until it is necessary. 

By monitoring productivity metrics, organizations with a lean mentality focus on team member production to determine when to add human resources. While they don’t ever want to understaff and suffer the consequences of having too few people and resources to get quality work done, they are more fearful of the dangers of overstaffing and the inefficiency it creates.  

Does your organization tilt toward lean or heavy? 

Discussing the philosophy preferences of your colleagues is a good place to start to make your staffing decisions intentional. While there are no “right” answers, how an organization staffs has tremendous consequences for how the work gets done and on who arrives and wants to stay.