The tolerated pain
Administrative work often accumulates gradually around capable employees because they know how to get things done. The business then pays specialist rates for coordination, re-keying, follow-up and routine preparation.
It rarely starts as a decision. An engineer fills in the job card because the form is awkward and nobody else understands the fields. A senior consultant formats the client report because the template breaks. A finance manager copies figures between systems because the integration was never finished. A sales lead chases signatures and updates the CRM by hand. Each task is small and each has an obvious reason. Together they reshape how expensive people spend their week.
Why businesses tolerate it
- The cost is invisible. Payroll is paid regardless of what the hours are used for, so no invoice ever shows the waste.
- Capable people absorb friction. The employees most able to work around a broken process are often the most senior, so the process never fails visibly.
- Admin feels like part of the job. Some administration genuinely is. The boundary between necessary judgement and repeatable clerical work is rarely examined.
- Fixing it needs time from the same people. The specialists who could explain the process are too busy to redesign it.
Survey evidence suggests the pattern is widespread. Microsoft's 2023 Work Trend Index reported that 64% of respondents said they struggle with having the time and energy to do their job, 68% said they lack enough uninterrupted focus time, and 62% said they spend too much time searching for information. Asana, a work-management vendor, reports in its Anatomy of Work Index that around 60% of time at work goes on "work about work" rather than skilled work. Vendor research should be read with care, and neither figure measures your organisation. They do show that the problem is common enough to be worth measuring.
Operational consequence
High-value work competes with low-value work for the same hours. Customer decisions, analysis, design, selling and problem solving are delayed while administration expands around them.
The symptoms include specialists working late to finish the work they were hired for, slow turnaround on proposals and quotes, analysis that is always one week behind, and senior people who cannot take on new clients or projects despite apparent headcount. The business may then hire another specialist to relieve the pressure, which adds expensive capacity without fixing the process that consumed it. The new hire soon inherits the same admin.
There is also a quality cost. Re-keying data by hand produces errors, and errors produce rework. The related pattern is explored in the cost of employees entering the same data twice.
How it becomes money
avoidable admin cost = loaded hourly cost × avoidable admin hours
Use the organisation's own loaded employment cost and observed hours. Add opportunity cost separately rather than pretending every recovered hour becomes revenue.
An illustrative cost model
All figures below are illustrative assumptions chosen to show the arithmetic. Replace each one with your own data before drawing conclusions.
- A team of 20 specialists with an assumed loaded cost of R450 per hour (salary plus benefits, employer contributions, equipment and workspace).
- A two-week time sample shows each specialist spends an assumed 6 hours a week on administration that does not need their expertise.
- An assumed 44 productive weeks per year after leave and public holidays.
| Step (illustrative) | Calculation | Result |
|---|---|---|
| Avoidable specialist admin hours | 20 × 6 × 44 | 5,280 hours |
| Payroll cost of those hours | 5,280 × R450 | R2,376,000 |
| Hours left after removing unnecessary steps (assumed 40% removed) | 5,280 × 60% | 3,168 hours |
| Cost if remaining work moves to an administrator at an assumed R180/hour | 3,168 × R180 | R570,240 |
| Annual payroll mismatch | R2,376,000 − R570,240 | R1,805,760 |
Six hours a week is 15% of a 40-hour week. In this example the business is effectively paying for three specialists' worth of time to do administrative work, without ever having decided to.
Opportunity cost, kept separate
The payroll mismatch is the cost of using the wrong capacity. Opportunity cost is what the recovered capacity could earn, and it should never be added automatically. Suppose, again as an illustrative assumption, that half of the 5,280 freed hours could be used for billable or revenue-generating work at an assumed R950 per hour. That suggests up to R2,508,000 of additional capacity value, but only if there is demand to fill it and the team actually redeploys the time. If the business is not capacity-constrained, the honest benefit may be reduced overtime, faster turnaround or avoided hiring instead.
Commercial trigger
If scarce specialists routinely perform repeatable clerical work, the process is consuming expensive capacity even when no new invoice appears.
The trigger becomes urgent when the business is about to hire more specialists to cope with demand, when senior people are turning away work or missing deadlines, when key staff cite workload as a reason to leave, or when a new system is being introduced. A hiring request is a particularly useful moment: before adding capacity, establish how much existing capacity is being spent on work that does not need it.
What good looks like
Specialists spend most of their time on work that uses their judgement. Routine inputs arrive in a standard form. Templates work. Data is entered once and flows to where it is needed. Administrative tasks that remain are either done by the right role or automated, and the business can show how specialist time is divided rather than guessing.
The aim is not to remove every administrative task from senior roles. Some administration carries judgement, accountability or client context that should stay with the specialist. The aim is to make that a deliberate choice.
Resolution
- Sample how specialist time is actually spent.
- Separate judgement from repeatable administration.
- Remove unnecessary steps before automating.
- Standardise inputs, templates and handoffs.
- Automate only stable, observable repeatable work.
- Track specialist time returned to higher-value activity.
Removing steps first matters. Automating a poor process makes the waste faster rather than smaller. Where the repeatable work is stable, the wider economics are covered in the payroll cost of repeatable manual work, and business automation can take on the parts that genuinely do not need a person.
Bottom line
The issue is not that senior employees should never do administration. It is that recurring low-value work should not silently become the operating model for expensive expertise. Measure the hours, price them at the real loaded cost, and the case for redesign usually becomes clear on its own.
Sources and further reading
- https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/worklab/work-trend-index/will-ai-fix-work (last verified 10 October 2026)
- How Work About Work Gets in the Way of Real Work [2026] • Asana (last verified 10 October 2026)