The meeting that ended with everyone agreeing
A team at a Stellenbosch wine-estate office meets on a Tuesday to discuss a customs query that is holding up an export shipment. Everyone agrees that someone should phone the clearing agent, and someone should confirm the new date with the buyer. The meeting ends. By Thursday, the clearing agent has had no call, the buyer has had two, and three people each believe one of the others is on it. The shipment waits.
Nobody was lazy. The problem was that the meeting produced agreement without ownership. "We need to follow up" is a sentence with no subject. When employees do not know who owns the next action, the work does not stop, it floats, and the business pays for the delay, the duplication and the checking that follows.
This article looks at the labour cost of unclear accountability for next actions. It is related to, but narrower than, the broader support-routing problem in support requests without clear owners. Here the question is about day-to-day work in any department: after this step, who does what?
Two versions of the same failure
Unclear ownership of the next action takes two opposite forms:
- Nobody does it. Each person assumes someone else will act, so the task waits until a customer, a supplier or the owner complains.
- Several people do it. Two or three employees each phone the supplier, send the email or fix the record, creating confusion and sometimes contradictory messages.
Both forms consume time. The first creates delay and escalation. The second wastes effort and annoys the person on the receiving end. A quiet third form is also common: the task is done, but nobody records it, so the next person repeats the check.
What the pattern looks like in a business
- Handover points where work moves from sales to operations, from operations to finance, or from one shift to another, and no one is named as receiving it.
- Email threads copied to six people with a question at the bottom.
- Meeting minutes with a list of "actions" but no names or dates.
- Employees who ask "is this mine?" before starting anything outside their usual routine.
- Managers who find out about a stalled task only when someone else reports it.
- Work that is dropped when the person who had it goes on leave or is off sick. The same weakness shows up in key-person dependency as a systems problem.
What management guidance says
Project and operations guidance has long used responsibility charts to deal with this. The RACI approach assigns each task or deliverable to people who are responsible, accountable, consulted and informed. Atlassian's overview of the RACI chart and Asana's guide to a RACI chart both describe the purpose in similar terms: to clarify who does the work, who is answerable for the result, and who must be kept informed. The key principle for a small business is simple. Every task has one person who is answerable for it, even if several people help.
A RACI chart is not needed for every task. But the idea behind it, a single named owner for each next step, is worth building into everyday routines. The article how to make ownership clear at every stage expands on how to do that without adding bureaucracy.
How the pain becomes money
- Waiting time. Work sits idle while everyone assumes someone else has it. Paid hours pass without progress on the item.
- Duplicate effort. Two employees doing the same task costs twice the time, and one of them wasted it.
- Checking and chasing. Managers and colleagues spend time asking "who has this?" and "has this been done?" The cost of this visibility gap is explored in managers chasing status updates.
- Missed deadlines. Late deliveries, late filings and late replies carry penalties, rework or lost goodwill.
- Interruptions. Each question to a colleague breaks their focus, and recovering from that costs more than the question itself.
- Escalation to senior staff. Decisions about who should act end up with the owner, who is the most expensive person in the company to ask.
An illustrative cost model
The numbers are illustrative assumptions for a hypothetical Johannesburg business with 40 office-based employees.
| Assumption | Value |
|---|---|
| Employees affected | 40 |
| Time lost per employee per week asking who owns something, checking, or duplicating a task | 1.5 hours |
| Loaded hourly cost | R200 |
| Working weeks per year | 46 |
| Manager and owner time on escalations per week | 5 hours at R450 |
| Penalties, rework or credit notes from missed actions per year | R60,000 |
- Staff time: 40 × 1.5 × R200 × 46 = R552,000
- Escalations: 5 × R450 × 46 = R103,500
- Penalties and rework: R60,000
- Illustrative total: about R715,000 a year
An hour and a half a week is only a little over 3% of a 45-hour week, which is why it goes unnoticed. If the real figure were half as large, the amount would still represent the salary of a good employee spent on working out whose turn it is.
Why it is tolerated
Unclear ownership feels like a people issue rather than a process issue. Managers say, "They should just take initiative." But taking initiative in an environment where the rules for ownership are unclear is risky. Employees who pick up a task that belongs to a colleague can cause friction, so many wait. Some businesses also believe that naming an owner is too formal for a small team. The reality is that the smaller the team, the fewer spare people there are to absorb the duplication.
What better looks like
The solution is lighter than most owners expect.
- Every action gets a name and a date. In meetings, emails and task lists, do not write "follow up with the supplier". Write "Thandi to call the supplier by Thursday".
- One owner per task. Others may help, but one person answers for the result.
- Define the handover points. For each stage where work changes hands, decide who receives it and how they know it has arrived. The ideas in how to map a business workflow without making it complicated help find these points.
- Use a visible task list. A shared board or request tool shows owners, status and due dates in one place. Jira Service Management is one example of software that assigns requests to a team and tracks them, and a simple shared spreadsheet or board can do a similar job for a small team.
- Name a backup. Each owner has a named deputy for leave and sickness.
- Review stalled items weekly. Anything with no owner or no movement is assigned or closed.
When it becomes urgent
- customers or suppliers complain that nobody got back to them;
- the owner is the default answer to "who should do this?";
- a deadline with a penalty was missed because everyone thought someone else had it;
- the business is growing, and the informal "we all just know" approach is breaking down.
Practical next actions
- Review the last three sets of meeting minutes and count actions with no name or date.
- Pick the three busiest handover points in the business and write down who owns the next action at each.
- Ask five employees to describe the last time they were unsure whether a task was theirs.
- Add owner and due date as required fields to any action list.
- Hold a ten-minute weekly review of every open item with no recent movement.
Bottom line
When employees do not know who owns the next action, work stalls or is done twice, managers spend their time asking questions, and customers wait for answers. The cost is small per incident and large in total. A name and a date on every action, a single accountable owner and a short weekly review of stalled items are inexpensive habits that pay back in hours every week.
Sources and further reading
- RACI Chart: What is it & How to Use - The Workstream (last verified 10 October 2026)
- RACI Charts: The Ultimate Guide, with Examples [2025] • Asana (last verified 10 October 2026)
- What is Jira Service Management? - Jira Service Management Cloud - Atlassian Support
Related Mellorca reading
- Policing Routine Work: The Management Cost of Checking Recurring Tasks by Hand
- Recreating Documents Nobody Can Find: The Cost of Duplicated Work
- "I Thought You Were Doing It": The Labour Cost of Unclear Responsibilities