몇 명부터 너무 많은지 아무도 정하지 않습니다.

Every agency has a number that decides how good its service is, and almost none of them have chosen it. It is the number of live students one counsellor is carrying. It is not in the plan, it is not reviewed, and it is usually discovered by accident when somebody leaves and their list has to be divided up.

The number matters because the work is not proportional to the headcount. A counsellor with forty live cases does not do twice the work of one with twenty. They do the same work plus the cost of switching between forty contexts, plus the messages they did not answer, plus the follow-ups that slipped because nothing reminded them.

Count live cases, not students.

The first correction is to stop counting names. A student who has enrolled and travels next month is not the same load as a student in the middle of a visa application with a document outstanding and a parent calling twice a week.

Weight the list by where each case sits. A useful rough split is three tiers: cases waiting on somebody else, cases needing active work this week, and cases in trouble. The third tier is small and consumes most of the day, and a counsellor with three of them is fully occupied regardless of what the headline number says.

The signals that appear before the complaints.

Caseload problems announce themselves for weeks before anybody escalates. The signals are in the record rather than in the mood of the office.

• Response time to a student message, measured in working hours rather than remembered.
• Follow-ups that were due and are now overdue, counted per counsellor rather than in total.
• Cases with no recorded activity for a fortnight while still marked active.
• Documents requested and never chased a second time.
• Students who went quiet, grouped by who was handling them.

The last one is uncomfortable and it is the most informative. If quiet students cluster around one counsellor, the question is not about that person's commitment. It is almost always about how many cases they were given.

What to do when the number is too high.

The instinct is to hire, and hiring takes a quarter to pay off. Three things work faster.

1. 01Move the waiting cases off the active list properly, with a date they come back, so the list a counsellor sees in the morning is the work that exists today.
2. 02Take the routine chasing away from the person doing the counselling. Document collection and appointment reminders do not need the person who knows the case.
3. 03Cap intake per counsellor deliberately for one intake and watch what happens to the signals above. It is the only way to find your own number rather than borrowing somebody else's.

The number is not a single number.

A counsellor handling one destination with a familiar sequence carries more cases comfortably than one handling four countries with different rules and different seasons. A counsellor working with families who need frequent explanation carries fewer. An office that sets one figure for everybody will overload half the team and under-use the other half.

Set it per counsellor, review it each intake, and write down why it is what it is. That last part is what makes it a decision instead of a habit.

Why it eventually shows up in the accounts.

An overloaded counsellor produces slower responses, which produce students who go quiet, which produce a marketing budget spent replacing students the office already had. It also produces turnover, and turnover in this job is expensive in a way that does not appear as a line item: the departing person takes the relationships, the context and the informal knowledge of thirty live cases with them.

Setting the number is cheaper than any of that, and it takes an afternoon with the record open. The output is one figure per counsellor, a note explaining what it assumes about destination mix and experience, and a date to look at it again. Nothing else about the office has to change for it to start working.