Larger companies are more efficient. More talent to pool from, better buying power, efficiencies of scale…… Right?
Many of us have heard this said, particularly if you worked in an organisation going through rapid growth (via acquisition for example) but I’m sure that for anyone who has been there, you’ll feel quite differently. I do, particularly with my past role as “innovation ambassador” in a multi-national. Size there was stifling – well, more precisely, poor communication was, but I’ll leave “innovation in a large company” for another day.
This post was to share with you a study by Allan Engelhardt. It hit a chord with us at Cogendo as it highlighted one of our motivations to create PerformanceHub. In a nutshell, he showes through crunching the numbers of more than 4000 companies, that there is often a relationship between organisational size and productivity (as measured by profitability). As a rule of thumb, for every 10% increase in organisation size expect a 1% drop off in productivity.
For companies undergoing rapid growth (which has problems in itself) these numbers don’t stack up well. Let’s say you have 50 employees at 100% productivity (nice to have) and grow to 100 employees over a year. Your average productivity per employee drops by around 8%. At an average employee cost of £40k a year, that’s over £3000 per year per employee wasted. Or in our little example, a total of more than £300,000 a year lost!!
This does beg the question – where’s the productivity going? Well, my opinion is that it’s lost in a myriad of small things. Degraded communication, devolved decision making, additional levels of bureaucracy, unclear disconnected goals, reduced employee focus and arthritic organisational agility to name a few.
If you’re reading this and nodding your head, you’re staring our motivation to create PerformanceHub in the face. With it, we try and address some of these problems head-on and from what we hear, we’re winning…….
Rob Wheatley
CEO
Cogendo
