My dad would always say it's better to have 3 men on a 4 man job than to have 5 men on a 4 man job. My experience says that he's right. You get more inefficiency as you increase the head count. We'd be short and everyone would do a decent job of splitting up the work. Then we'd get a few people too many and no one wants to do anything because they see what they perceive as extra bodies who didn't have enough to do -- let's give them something to do.
working short staffed works when there is a drive by management and the C-suite to keep the equilibrium of "4 person job, 4 people" as high as possible. The MBA types have been taught "Well, they got thru it with only 3 people, now its only a 3 person job." So every job becomes a 3 person job.
Then you get the 3 people who want additional compensation for the additional workload that a direct consequence of them just getting it done. Then the MBA types hum, haw, delay while workers are burning out.
Then you lose one or two of those 3, the replacements are hired, and now you're only at 50% efficiency with the same 3 people. Orders start backing up, 1 worker is super-stressed because he's doing 70% of the lifting now for the other 15% of newbies. Weeks go by, the first employee is now back to his normal, short staffed workload without any recovery time from the burn, causing the next one to go that guy.
I also see the other half of the equation. No sense in paying bodies to sit there and do little to nothing, or to get the other workers upset at the one person doing less work. Then everyone gets lazy and productivity per employee suffers and costs get higher.
I'm far from an expert on this topic. Hell, my example above also assumes that 100% of the workers have the same basic drive of completing the work as efficiently as possible and being a fair person to each other. We know that isn't' true in the real world.
Couple that all with the fact of what we do, even with everyone hard work, can be for moot if there is one hiccup. Plane breaks down, wx, hub, pup courier doesn't put the doc in a bin and it falls behind the supplies in the truck, courier misses something at a pickup, someone mistakenly forgets to load the one bag with 2 docs because "it looked empty". When everyone has to walk the tightrope of near-perfection, mistakes become irrecoverable problems that are mind-numbingly easy to do. And by irrecoverable, I'm discussing about making your originally promised service. Yes, they'll get their stuff, but we still failed.
That also doesn't count the fact that we are completely at the whim of having less than a days notice to plan for everything to make it all happen.
