There’s no real answer to this, as the size of a Designated Work Group (DWG) depends on a number of work-related and worksite specific factors. The most important things to remember are that the Act says that the manner of grouping employees should be in a way that:
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best and most conveniently enables the interests of those employees relating to occupational health and safety to be represented and safeguarded; and
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best takes account of the need for a health and safety representative for the designated work group or groups to be accessible to each member of the group.
A rep recently wrote in to ‘Ask Renata’ saying that inspecting his DWG, which has over 200 people in it, took over four hours to do – the response: ‘That’s probably too big!’ Read more on DWGs