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I think the rules are made for the situation that someone scouts or keeps watch and the others from the group just hang around in his area, talk, sing, or do other things that disturb his perception.
If more then one persons keeps nightwatch for example it seems not useful for me to give them a malus on their role. I think the rules for helping each other (get a bonus for each helping other character) seems to fit better here.

Bit late to the party on this one, but wanted to weigh in to also say this comes across odd and counter-intuitive to me, and would to my players.  If my players are setting up a sentry over their camp and are paranoid, they may want to have two people keeping watch.  If I turn around and say, OK, but you are now penalised, they will not be happy.  I see what is being attempted by the rule, but IMO this isn't the right implementation.  It shouldn't always be easier for someone to sneak up on four sentries than it is to sneak up on one.

I totally agree on this one! It seems very odd to me to penalise my players for have more eyes and ears than one pair. I will not use it. The group roll rule is a good thing but for Stealth and Scouting? Don’t like this very much. You take the lowest skill level for Stealth and then penalise it further? This is counterproductive. This way you punish player with a good Stealth Skill. I think if I‘m using Group Stealth I will use the best skill and then penalise this score as described in the rules.
And for Scouting? It’s the highest score that’s fine but I don’t think there should be penalties. I think I will not use them. I also think that I don’t use Stealth and Scouting Group rolls for player characters but only for NPCs.

I was really a fan of the rules from Tales from the Loop- that when you have more successes than needed, you can give companions sucesses. Is that possible in FL, too? 

Bit late to the party on this one, but wanted to weigh in to also say this comes across odd and counter-intuitive to me, and would to my players.  If my players are setting up a sentry over their camp and are paranoid, they may want to have two people keeping watch.  If I turn around and say, OK, but you are now penalised, they will not be happy.  I see what is being attempted by the rule, but IMO this isn't the right implementation.  It shouldn't always be easier for someone to sneak up on four sentries than it is to sneak up on one.

I agree that it is an unnecessary complication and counter intuitive, and argument making at the table.

I actually think my favourite implementation of group action is in Blades in the Dark (if you have it, read "Lead a Group Action" on page 134).  In a nutshell, here's how it works:

When everyone takes the same action, one person is identified as the leader for the action (usually the person with the highest rank).  Everyone involved in the action then rolls. The group counts the single best result as the overall effort for everyone who rolled.  However, the character leading the group action takes 1 stress for each PC that failed the roll.  Basically, the leader is covering for the less experienced in the group.

This is ripe for interpretation in Forbidden Lands / Year Zero.  For example, you could rule that failures count against the best success instead of adding stress.  Here's an example.

PC1 (leader): rolls Sneak (7d6) and gets 3 successes
PC2: rolls Sneak (5d6) and gets 1 success (this result is ignored)
PC3: rolls Sneak (4d6) and fails (one failure)
PC4: rolls Sneak (3d6) and fails (one failure)
Result: The 3 successes from the best roll are reduced from 2 failures, giving one success.

I like this better than taking Stress, because if the leader only gets a single success and everyone else in the group fails, it shouldn't make sense for the leader to somehow cause the team to succeed regardless.  They were all crap and (s)he barely did a good job.

Saying that, taking Stress could still be an option, ruled thus: "You either reduce the number of successes, or take Stress equal to the number of failures."

Naturally the group of guards would also roll Scout in exactly the same way.  You take the best result and (since it's passive) only give the option to reduce the successes by the number of failures, rather than having the lead guard take stress.

Thoughts?

Like the idea better than as stated in the rules. But it‘s a new view of a group roll. And I personally don’t want to change this rule because I quite like it. I think I will go for this:
Group Stealth: Best score but penalise it for further characters, max. -3.
Group Scouting: Lowest Score but with a bonus of up to +3.

Like the idea better than as stated in the rules. But  it‘s a new view of a group roll. And I personally don’t want to change this rule because I quite like it. I think I will go for this:
Group Stealth: Best score but penalise it for further characters, max. -3.
Group Scouting: Lowest Score but with a bonus of up to +3.

For your modifiers, do you mean "-3" as "remove 3 successes" (as I suggest) or "remove 3 dice" (as per RAW)?

Like the idea better than as stated in the rules. But  it‘s a new view of a group roll. And I personally don’t want to change this rule because I quite like it. I think I will go for this:
Group Stealth: Best score but penalise it for further characters, max. -3.
Group Scouting: Lowest Score but with a bonus of up to +3.

For your modifiers, do you mean "-3" as "remove 3 successes" (as I suggest) or "remove 3 dice" (as per RAW)?

Dice

Suggestion:
1) Scouting as a group to detect a specific place, object, or threat should give +1 bonus Dice because you are all coordinating efforts for the same goal.
2) Scouting as a group to detect anything of interest (unspecified) should give -1 penalty Dice because the group’s focus is uncoordinated as people look for different things and not sure what they’ll find.

A comment from one of my players "Fine with lowest rolls for stealth, although -1 per additional person may be a bit harsh in addition. Think the scouting rule is a bit silly - it's called a "search party" for a reason. I'd be fine with keeping the highest roll for scouting, and lowest roll for stealth, and ditch the additional modifiers completely. This still means that larger groups are likely to find each other, but allows for well-trained smaller commando teams to still be stealthy."

What if for stealth you rolled the highest skill with a -1 for each additional character without a rank in the stealth skill?

And for Scouting, roll the highest skill with a +1 for each additional character that has a rank in the scouting skill and -1 for every character without a rank, although this would lead to situations where characters sat out of the scouting task (Or as Jizmack suggested above).