• "There is a growing consensus among business professionals that 5 to 8 member teams maximize employees’ potential. This small number leads to more engagement, accountability, and productivity. Adding more team members may hinder team productivity overall.
• A Gallup 2013 report also found that "companies with fewer than 10 employees scored engagement levels of 42%, whereas the average engagement level for bigger companies was below 30%. " This was also a similar trend within larger companies where teams with “5 to 9 employees have relatively higher engagement compared with teams of ten or more employees.”
• Smaller teams also "allow for greater accountability, autonomy, and flexibility, both in terms of scheduling- and idea-based changes. They foster greater trust among team members and less fear of failure.”
• Gallup also found that “managers are the most powerful influence on workers’ engagement levels and managers with larger teams have a bigger challenge when it comes to engaging their employees.
• Experienced managers are also recommended not to be responsible for more than 9 employees as it can hinder their ability to make meaningful relationships with their team members.

Project Management Statistics

• "83% of project organizations reported that they were understaffed at some level."
• In 2016, the average PMO had a staff size of 9.
• "80% of high-performing projects are led by a certified project manager."
• "Poorly trained project managers, attempting too many projects, and a lack of project funding are the top three project management challenges."
• "77% of high performing projects use project management software, however, 44% of project managers do not believe the use of software to manage projects."

Summary

• For the initial hour, we were mainly able to focus on insights relevant to staffing projects or teams in general as well as insights relevant to project management.
• Some insights that we came across on staffing mainly referred to staffing in terms of HR recruitment as a whole. We redirected the search to focus on team size for projects, in general, as well as project management statistics to use as benchmarks, as this appeared to be of interest. However, we can continue and redirect the research to identify more general insights on staffing, if this is preferred.
• In the course of our research, we also came across other insights and statistics on project management, which might also be of interest.
• Feel free to add or select an option below.