Managers Who Spend the Day Chasing Updates: The Management Cost

The tolerated pain

A branch manager starts the day by messaging four people to ask where their jobs stand. By mid-morning two have replied, one has asked a question back and one is on site without signal. After lunch there is a status meeting, mostly spent going around the table. By late afternoon the manager has a reasonable picture of the day, just in time for it to change. Tomorrow the cycle starts again.

Many managers would describe this as simply what managing is. Keeping in touch with the team is part of the role. But there is a difference between leading people and collecting information from them by hand, and in many small and mid-sized businesses the second has crowded out the first.

This article is about the management time consumed by chasing updates, and what that time is not being spent on. Why chasing is a symptom of missing systems rather than poor communication is covered in why chasing people for updates is a systems failure. Here the focus is the cost to the business of managers acting as human status reports.

Why businesses put up with it

• Managers were promoted for doing the work. Checking on it feels like the natural extension of their old role.
• Work status lives in people's heads. Jobs are tracked in personal notes, inboxes and chats, so asking is the only way to find out.
• Tools exist but are not used consistently. A task board was set up once, but half the team update it and the other half do not, so nobody trusts it.
• Chasing feels responsible. A manager who checks in often looks engaged, so the habit is rewarded.
• The cost sits in salaries. Management time does not appear as a separate expense, so its use is rarely questioned.

Operational symptoms

• daily or weekly meetings spent mainly on "where are we with...";
• managers sending the same "any update?" messages to several people;
• staff interrupted mid-task to report progress, then having to restart;
• status that is only known by phoning someone, as described in when a status update requires a staff member to investigate;
• managers working evenings on planning, coaching or reporting because the day went on chasing;
• team members who feel micromanaged and managers who feel they cannot let go.

The management cost

Management time is expensive, and it is meant to be spent on things only managers can do: deciding, coaching, solving problems, looking after key customers and improving how the work is done. Every hour spent gathering facts that a system could show is an hour taken from those things.

The pressure on managers is real and measurable. Gallup's State of the Global Workplace report found that global manager engagement fell from 31% in 2022 to 22% in 2025, and that this decline accounts for most of the recent drop in employee engagement. Gallup also reports that leaders experience more daily stress than the people they supervise. A manager who spends the day chasing information has less time for the coaching and support that teams need from them.

Communication load adds to this. Microsoft's Work Trend Index report Will AI Fix Work? found that people spend 57% of their time in Microsoft 365 communicating through meetings, email and chat, and 43% creating. Status chasing is not all of that communication, but it is one of the easiest parts to remove.

How the pain becomes money

• Management labour cost: expensive hours spent collecting information rather than acting on it.
• Staff interruption cost: each status request breaks someone's concentration and adds restart time.
• Displaced management work: coaching, customer relationships, planning and process improvement are postponed, which shows up later as weaker performance and avoidable problems.
• Span-of-control cost: when chasing consumes a manager's day, the business needs more managers per employee to keep control.
• Retention cost: both burnt-out managers and micromanaged staff are more likely to leave.

An illustrative cost model

This example is illustrative, and every figure is an assumption to show the method. Picture a Western Cape facilities maintenance company with six supervisors overseeing about 70 field and office staff.

On these assumptions management time spent chasing costs about R4,950 a day across six managers, or roughly R1.09 million a year. Staff interruptions add 72 a day at about R33 each, or around R2,400 a day and R528,000 a year. The total is about R1.6 million a year before counting the value of the coaching, planning and customer work that did not happen. If shared visibility removed two-thirds of the chasing, each manager would regain about an hour a day. Test the method by asking managers to log their chasing for one week.

When it becomes commercially urgent

1. Managers routinely work late to catch up on the parts of their job that chasing displaced.
2. Status meetings take longer than the decisions made in them.
3. The business is about to promote or hire another manager because existing ones are "stretched".
4. Staff turnover or exit interviews mention micromanagement or lack of support.

What better looks like

Status is recorded where the work happens and is visible to anyone who needs it. When a job moves, the person doing it updates it in seconds, or the system updates it automatically when a form is submitted or an invoice is raised. Managers look first and ask second. Microsoft's guidance on setting and updating task progress in Planner describes marking tasks as not started, in progress or completed, and its charts view shows tasks by status, priority and team member, including which are late and who is overloaded. Field service, project and job management systems offer similar views for more complex work.

Tools only help if the team uses them consistently, so the update must be quicker than the phone call it replaces. Meetings then shift from collecting status to discussing exceptions and decisions. The distinction is explored in the difference between having data and having visibility.

Practical next actions

1. Ask each manager to log chasing for a week: who they asked, about what, and how long it took to get an answer.
2. List the questions asked most often. These define what a shared status view must show.
3. Choose one place for work status per team and agree the few states every job moves through.
4. Make updating effortless, ideally triggered by steps people already take, such as closing a job card.
5. Change the meeting format so the board is reviewed beforehand and the meeting covers blockers and decisions only.
6. Repeat the log after a month and compare.

The underlying cause is often described in why management has poor visibility into the business. Designing workflows that make status visible by default is part of Mellorca's digital operations work.

Bottom line

A manager who spends the day chasing updates is being paid a manager's salary to do a system's job. The cost is the hours themselves, the interruptions to the team, and the coaching and improvement that never happen. Making work status visible where the work is done gives managers their time back and lets them manage people rather than information.

Sources and further reading

• State of the Global Workplace Report
• https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/worklab/work-trend-index/will-ai-fix-work
• Set and update task progress | Microsoft Support
• View charts of your plan's progress | Microsoft Support