GBS by the Numbers: Why Many Leaders Stay Lean – and Some Scale Big

GBS FTEs relative to enterprise
Source: Research conducted across global GBS leaders, Q4 2025

The distribution shows that most leading GBS organizations operate with a relatively lean captive footprint: 67% report GBS FTEs below 3% of enterprise headcount, with the median in the 2-3% range (42%). This reinforces a structural reality in mature GBS models: centralization delivers disproportionate value relative to size. Even at ~2-3% of enterprise workforce, GBS typically supports a much larger share of transactional and increasingly knowledge-based processes. For leaders, this is a useful benchmark: a well-scoped GBS does not need to be large to be strategically material. 

At the same time, the long tail above 3% (33% of respondents) highlights differing ambition levels and service scope. Organizations in the 3-4% and 4-5% bands (25% combined) are usually those that have expanded beyond classic finance/HR/IT into analytics, procurement, industry operations, or digital product support. The fact that 8% of GBS operate at ≥6% of total enterprise FTEs suggests a subset of enterprises using GBS as a primary operating backbone rather than a functional aggregator. For peers, this indicates that scale is often a deliberate design choice tied to how far the enterprise is willing to globalize work and standardize processes. 

“Scale is often a deliberate design choice tied to how far the enterprise is willing to globalize work and standardize processes.” 

Overall, GBS models tend to cluster around either “focused efficiency hubs” (<3%) or “scaled enterprise platforms” (≥6%), with fewer organizations sitting in between. This typically reflects governance posture. Companies either constrain GBS scope to protect business-unit autonomy, or they commit to end-to-end global process ownership and migrate work at scale. Leaders evaluating expansion should therefore clarify intent early as incremental growth may stall without a mandate for process standardization and global service management. 

For GBS leaders, the practical takeaway is to anchor sizing discussions in value density rather than headcount ratios alone. A 2-3% footprint is consistent with strong maturity if it covers high-volume global processes with automation leverage. Moving toward 4%+ generally requires adding higher-complexity or revenue-proximate services, stronger platform capabilities, and tighter enterprise governance. The benchmark bands in this chart can thus serve as a diagnostic: below 2% may indicate under-penetration, 2-3% reflects typical maturity, and >4% signals a strategic shift toward GBS as an enterprise operating model rather than a support construct.