Can you have too many staff? Do you think members finding it comforting, or disturbing if there are a lot of staff (hinting at a troubled forum perhaps?)
What if you have no staff, I run my forum by myself, no problems so far, I know I may need to take on staff later but for now it's doing fine with just me, what message do you think having few or no staff gives out?
Yes. You can have too many staff. When you load yourself up with too many staff, you end up with a lot of problems. These can include staff disputes, staff being inactive, and having more staff than members at times too.
When checking out some of the newer forums that get promoted here, it astonishes me to see a Staff hierarchy of 2-3 Admins and 5-6 Moderators. It makes no sense at all. Firstly, you run the high risk of intimidating members - like Irviding said if the Staff:Member ratio is too large then it's only going to do one thing, scare members away.
Secondly, over staffing can look bad when it comes to your topics. Normally you'll find it turns into case of the Admin posting a topic, then a moderator replies, then another moderator replies, then another moderator replies and then if you're lucky a normal member will post something before the next mod has their say.
Was looking through our Recruitment Section the other day, and it seems like people think there's some kind of unwritten rule which states "If you're making a new forum - you need moderators". As you've demonstrated that's baloney. When I ran a forum of my own in the past, much like you I was the only "Staff Member" shall we say - at least for the majority of the time. When the forums got busier and I took on other commitments, then I recruited a second admin and one moderator accordingly.
Here in terms of Global Moderators we currently have around 7. 3 Admins, 3 Team Leaders and 1 Community Team members - and to be honest, that's even more than enough for our community that gets 600+ posts per day.
At the end of the day, when it comes to recruiting staff personally I think it's important to keep the numbers as low as possible, whilst having enough to do the required job and do it well. ~smile~
Yes it is possible to have too much staff.
It can get disturbing to members as they will crowd the members.
Suppense how big your forum, you can only judge on how much staff you need when your forum is big.
I think it is a bad idea to have more than 6 staff on a small forum with about 40 - 60 members.
If it is a wide open forum with 400 members+ it is probabaly necessary to have about 11 staff but split them into groups.
This is one of the top things I look for when im reviewing. So many people get too many staff. From what I see, these forums with more staff, have less members. This could be based on a lot of things, but as stated above, more staff can make members feel stalked or watched the whole time.
You really want to think about it before you hire a staff member. ~smile~
