Elon Musk is used to running optimization campaigns across all of his companies. In his biography of the millionaire, Walter Isaacson describes how all of his products eventually go through this optimization filter, eliminating parts and simplifying their production to the bare minimum. “If you don’t have to add back some of what you took out after you’re done, you didn’t take out enough,” Musk said.

One of the first things Elon Musk did when he landed at Twitter headquarters after his billion-dollar acquisition was to lay off 80% of the company’s staff: managers, engineers, moderators, developers, or salespeople. Elon Musk left no head puppet behind nor the department without the dose of layoffs.

Currently, X continues to operate with 20% of its original staff, despite having to rehire more people. Science answers how this is possible: The Ringelmann Effect.

What is the Ringelmann effect?

The Ringelmann Effect owes its name to the French engineer Maximilien Ringelmann, who conducted a series of studies in which he observed the social and group psychology of people between 1882 and 1887. Later studies at the University of Washington and the University of Massachusetts confirmed the validity of this theory.

Ringlemann directed his studies to finding the efficiency of agricultural work and used rope pulling exercises in groups of two, three and eight to do this. The engineer attached one end of the rope to a device that measured the pull and as the group of people pulling the rope increased, The less force each person uses to pull.

So no matter how many people joined the group, they did not contribute their efforts, on the contrary, the effort was distributed and the applied force did not increase at the expected rate. This theory eliminated the proverb:Unity gains strength“He concludes that with each new addition to the team, the effective effort exerted by each individual diminishes.

Ivan D. Steiner further developed this theory in 1972 and classified the types of tasks in which the Ringelmann Effect is most likely to occur:

• Additional tasks. These are tasks, such as office work, that imply that more people will lead to greater productivity. In this case, the people involved assume that the effort not exerted will be compensated for by the rest of the group. This thinking is not always conscious.
• Distinctive tasks. In this category, the performance of the most competent (the strongest, the most productive, the most knowledgeable, etc.) is referenced. In this case, the Ringelmann Effect demotivates less talented individuals in the background, reducing their effort and reducing the “pulling power” of the team as a whole.
• Combined tasksThe Ringelmann Effect affects the most talented subjects in tasks where all members work in a coordinated manner, causing them to relax, equalize the group average, and reduce the performance they would achieve by acting individually.

There is nowhere to hide

For those who have been in a closed group for a long time, there is no need for a tug-of-war test to identify subjects who are affected by the Ringelmann Effect and who are very productive when their individual work is going well. They will come out but then relax when it comes to developing a joint project. If you haven’t spotted it, that’s you..

The Ringelmann Effect is a psychological concept widely known by human resources departments of companies and also by Elon Musk.

Twitter’s new owner chose to force different teams to focus all their efforts on projects by shrinking their size by X. He then limited himself to adjusting the operation by adding reinforcements to teams that really needed the resources to move forward.

Have you ever wondered why your company doesn’t just hire someone else to relieve some of the workload on the entire team? Now you know that doing so would cause existing members to underperform and become less productive. So the end result would be the same, but the pay would be higher.

On Xataka | Elon Musk sends X advertisers out for a breath of fresh air. The company’s valuation is already down 71%.

Image | Unsplash (Anna Samoylova), Flickr (Steve Jurvetson)