Your team are busy, right? Of course they are – they always are! But busy doing what, exactly? Because:
There are meetings happening.
Reports are being produced.
Projects moving forward.
Yet despite all of this activity, leaders often have the same lingering feeling:
We should be further ahead than we are. Maybe further ahead in projects, further ahead in targets, or further ahead in growth. Whatever the context, you feel you should be… further ahead.
In many cases, the problem isn’t a lack of talent, effort, or even technology. It’s something far simpler.
Your best people are spending their time doing work that shouldn’t require a human at all. Let’s explain.
Most organisations don’t intentionally design workflows where highly skilled employees perform low-value tasks. It happens over time.
A company starts small
Processes evolve organically
People fill in gaps where needed
The work gets done, results are achieved, and the small business does grow. Gradually, though, more manual steps begin to accumulate.
None of these tasks are inherently wrong. They need to be done. But they never require the expertise of the person performing them. Often, they don’t require a human at all!
For example, if you’ve hired graphic designers, you pay them to design graphics… not to spend a considerable chunk of their time dealing with paperwork. Yet this is an issue we faced recently with a marketing client. Their process meant their Lead Graphic Designer had to deal with paperwork that could have been automated.
And this is exactly what happens in many organisations.
Highly skilled employees become responsible for coordinating information, managing internal processes, and handling administrative tasks that slowly consume their time.
This isn’t a theoretical problem. It shows up in very real, very practical ways inside organisations.
We often see finance teams manually processing invoices, checking data line by line, and chasing approvals across multiple systems.
We see engineers spending time gathering information from different platforms before they can even begin solving a problem.
We see teams manipulating spreadsheets for hours just to prepare data for reporting.
None of this work is particularly complex. But it is time consuming. And because it sits inside the workflow, it becomes part of the day-to-day role.
Over time, these small tasks build up. What starts as a minor administrative step becomes a significant portion of someone’s workload. And that’s where the real inefficiency lies.
The root of the problem usually lies in how processes develop as businesses grow.
In the early stages of a company, informal workflows work perfectly well.
People communicate directly.
Updates happen quickly.
Everyone knows what is going on.
But as the organisation grows, the amount of work inside the business grows with it. More customers means:
If those processes remain manual, the only way to manage the additional workload is to involve more people. It quickly becomes a loop: businesses grow, it becomes more work, more personnel… more work, more personnel… and so on.
Eventually, employees start spending a significant portion of their time simply keeping the organisation running. And that’s not growth. In fact, it could be the opposite.
One of the biggest reasons low-value work continues to exist is simply because no one has stopped to question it.
A real-world example we saw in one of our clients was;
When we came in with a fresh pair of eyes, we asked “Why do you do this?” and the response was “That’s just how we’ve always done it”… or at least that’s what they had been told by the process, the same process said because the Finance Department required it.
So we asked the Finance Department why they needed this invoice number handwritten on the document…
“We don’t.”
Why that step entered the process in the first place, we’ll never know, but it had, and was now causing administrative drag for literally no reason.
In many cases, those steps are no longer needed. But because they’ve never been challenged, or employees communicated to each other, they continue to consume time and effort across the business.
When talented employees spend large amounts of time on repetitive or administrative tasks, the impact is larger than many businesses realise.
1. Reduced productivity
Highly paid employees spend time on tasks that add little value.
Instead of doing what they’re paid to do (Marketing Managers that analyse data, Graphic Designers that design graphics, or Financial Heads optimising budgets), they’re compiling information or managing internal processes.
2. Slower business growth
When operational work increases, businesses often respond by hiring more people.
But if payroll grows at the same rate as revenue, the organisation isn’t becoming more efficient. It’s simply becoming bigger. Issues are scaling at the same rate as pay and income (remember, this isn’t growth).
3. Lower employee satisfaction
Most professionals enjoy the core work they were hired to do.
Recruiters want to recruit.
Engineers want to solve technical problems.
Salespeople want to build relationships with customers.
Repetitive administrative work rarely motivates anyone. So, you want employees focused on the areas of their role that bring the most value to the company.
How do you achieve that? First, you’ve got to get to the root cause of the issue. And you must understand why the problem has got to where it is.
Low-value work tends to grow almost unnoticed inside organisations.
A process that initially takes ten minutes can slowly expand as the business grows.
For example:
Ultimately, if you spend ten hours a week chasing project updates, that turns into fifteen… then twenty… then thirty. Eventually, entire roles emerge simply to manage internal coordination.
This creates what many organisations experience as operational drag — the feeling that progress is slower than it should be despite increasing effort from the team.
So, how do you prevent this?
This is exactly where automation should play a role.
The purpose of automation isn’t to replace skilled employees.
It’s to remove the repetitive work that surrounds them.
Automation is particularly effective for tasks that follow the same set of rules each time, such as:
Instead of people chasing information manually, systems can collect it automatically. So an engineer who was spending an hour gathering data on technical problems can now spend that hour working on the issue, with all the data in front of them. Likewise, a salesperson who would spend 2-3 hours researching a new client, can now spend those 2-3 hours with that new client with all the information in front of them.
When workflows are designed properly, the process itself handles the coordination.
Employees simply interact with the output. This increases the very important, productivity per employee metric.
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