Crews in Planner in Planner/Project accelerator

I would like to thank everyone for their replies.  Unfortunately I need a system with a central database like Planner, so the desktop client is out, and with the recent news about Project Online that is out too. 

I appreciate everyone's responses here.

Planner itself doesn’t support assigning a single task to a “crew” and automatically multiplying effort based on the number of people. You basically have two practical approaches:

Manual method:

Assign the task to each individual in the crew separately and track effort for each person.

This ensures Planner calculates work correctly per resource.

Workarounds with automation:

You could create a Power Automate flow that triggers when a “crew” is assigned and distributes or multiplies effort across members, but this can get complicated and isn’t officially supported.

Alternatively, for reporting purposes, you can export Planner data to Power BI and calculate total effort by multiplying the task’s baseline effort by the crew size.

If managing crews and auto-calculating effort is critical, the best long-term solution is to use Microsoft Project desktop, which fully supports crew resources, effort-driven tasks, and automatic calculations.

Planner works best for lightweight task tracking, but it has limitations for complex resource management.

In addition to Rod's excellent answer, if the ability to add and manage crews is necessary for your project management needs, I would recommend you migrate to the Microsoft Project desktop application, and abandon Planner Premium.  It is very easy to manage crews in Microsoft Project.  Hope this helps.