Social Loafing

We’ve all seen it hap­pen. The more peo­ple in the room the less gets done. It’s one rea­son why we hate meet­ings. The Ringel­mann Effect or Social Loaf­ing is the dynamic whereby the more peo­ple pulling on a rope the less each per­son pulls. Com­bined they cre­ate a greater pull than indi­vid­u­ally but no one per­son pulls as hard as if they were by them­selves. We habit­u­ally count on oth­ers to take the load. While I don’t really care why this hap­pens I think it’s worth­while to know how to min­i­mize the effect. Here’s a list of best prac­tices for killing Social Loafing.

1. Hold peo­ple account­able. If you know they can do some­thing, expect them to.
2. Give home­work, con­firm peo­ple know what is expected of them prior to a meeting.
3. Ask for sta­tus updates, don’t sur­prise peo­ple but require them to state their progress.
4. Force peo­ple to use straight talk, don’t tol­er­ate mubo-jumbo.
5. Focus on out­puts, out­comes and results. Inputs (hours, calls, vis­its) don’t matter.
6. Set clear expec­ta­tions, employ­ees can’t read your mind. Test them with good questions.
7. Reward employ­ees based on team out­comes not only indi­vid­ual or com­pany success.

Lead­er­ship will have to do a lit­tle more think­ing to uti­lize these con­cepts but the effort will be rewarded with dra­mat­i­cally improved team per­for­mance. Kill the loafers!