Opinion
As Australians, we pay a healthy amount of tax. There are taxes on our income, the goods and services we buy, capital gains we make and various stamp duties depending on where in the country you live.
But there’s also another form of tax that we are secretly paying in the workplace. It was first coined by Airbnb’s chief executive Brian Chesky when he talked about some of the problems with too many meetings at work.
His solution was simple yet radical: “People create meetings,” he said, “so the best way to get rid of meetings is to not have so many people.”
Chesky argues that every additional person added to a business or team comes with a productivity cost that creates more meetings, reviews and administration that slows down execution and creates inefficiencies. His term for this? A “communication tax” you pay for every new colleague.
We like to think that one of the best ways to supercharge a team is to just add more staff to spread the workload more widely, but each new person does come with a cost. The more colleagues you have to manage, the higher the communication tax everyone pays to keep them motivated and updated at all times.
This cost is rarely paid by bosses like Chesky at the top of the food chain, instead landing squarely on middle management who need to spend time translating up and down the chain to keep everyone aligned.
Jeff Bezos believes individual teams should be no bigger than the number of people who can share two pizzas together.
It’s also a problem that’s only increased as our average team sizes have grown. Gallup data shows that the average number of people who report to a manager rose from 10.9 in 2024 to 12.1 in 2025, an increase of around 50 per cent since they started measuring it in 2013.
The co-founder of Slack, Stewart Butterworth, estimates that communicating within small teams takes up 20 per cent of an employee’s time, and this more than doubles with larger teams. All these data points raise an interesting question that’s worth interrogating: what is the ideal team size at work?
Well, the answer depends on exactly what you’re trying to optimise for. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos infamously has a “two pizza rule”, where he believes individual teams should be no bigger than the number of people who can share two pizzas together. Depending on how many slices you consume, that’s somewhere between 6 and 8 people.
Fewer people than that, and there’s a risk to the diversity of skills and voices required to ensure all perspectives are heard. And if it’s too much bigger, you’ll end up paying the cost via endless meetings, function duplication and excessive messages and emails.
In 2020, Gallup conducted a meta-analysis of over 200,000 teams to answer the same question about what the ideal number of staff was for a manager to succeed. Surprisingly, they concluded that it ultimately didn’t matter how many people reported up the line, the real factor for success what how engaged – or not – a manager was.
Still, most workers don’t have too much input into the overall size of their teams, but you can still influence the outcome of what happens when groups are assembled to complete a project.
If the objective of your team is just to communicate, then larger groups can be useful ways of spreading information quickly. But if you’re bringing a team together to complete specific and accountable outcomes, then choosing the right size of a team to minimise your communication tax can be the crucial difference between wild success and abject failure.
Tim Duggan is author of Work Backwards: The Revolutionary Method to Work Smarter and Live Better. He writes a regular newsletter at timduggan.substack.com
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