Span of Control

Span of control refers to the number of people reporting to a manager. The overall average across all industries is 6.7 (Visier benchmarks across 40,000 companies) but it varies widely by company.

In hospital-based nursing this number is 13:1, in residential care it's 6:1, in retail it's 8:1, in manufacturing it's 7:1. In professional services it's 5:1. These vary widely by sub-industry.

In today's organizations this number is increasing as managers themselves work on teams, so people have a less 1:1 relationship with their manager. Please use Galileo(tm) to analyze your span of control carefully.