Improve your management and leadership structures by getting span of control right!
In today’s dynamic health care landscape, organizations continue to focus on improvements to their management and leadership structures. A critical part of this is getting span of control right. This includes determining the number of full time equivalents (FTEs) a manager or leader can effectively oversee.
Many hospitals and health systems have been targeting wider spans of control by increasing the number of reports under each manager to enable greater efficiency – where less supervision is required and employees are encouraged to work more independently and autonomously.
How does your organization compare?
We compiled the latest data from our Workforce Metrics Benchmark Database to share industry norms and best practices:
- The average health care executive oversees about 180 FTEs through direct and indirect reports.
- Executives overseeing certain clinical functions such as Nursing or service lines might have upwards of 1,000 FTEs reporting up through them. Depending on organization size, those overseeing areas like HR or Marketing may have between 30 and 50 employees working under them.
- Workforce span of control on a per-executive basis includes 4.2 Leaders for every Executive, 2.7 managers for every Leader, 14.4 Individual Contributors for every Manager.
- Span of control varies by career stage and job family – as the workforce grows, front-line managers are seeing an increase in their direct scope of accountability.
- Clinical job families have a higher average number of total direct reports across all career stages.
- There are still some outliers – while there to continues to be some Management employees with no direct reports, this number is decreasing across all career stages.
- Many organizations continue to take steps to review leadership and executive positions that do not have formal people oversight to ensure appropriate leveling and accountability.
- …and more!
How can you move forward?
Organizations should take a bottom-up approach using span of control benchmarks to identify the number of management roles needed at each level.
Using Supervisor, Manager, Director, and Executive job titles:
- Start with the first level of management (Supervisors) to set a foundational guideline relative to the market
- Define the next level of Managers and set the corresponding target number of Supervisors below them
- Extend this framework upward through to Senior Managers and on then through to Director- and Executive-level positions
Dive deeper into our infographic to learn more!
We can help to evaluate span of control at your organization.
Looking to reduce the cost of labor and enhance employee autonomy, satisfaction and engagement? Evaluating the number of direct and indirect reports can help to streamline managerial oversight!
