"I Thought You Were Doing It": The Labour Cost of Unclear Responsibilities

The tolerated pain

A customer asks for a revised quote. The account manager assumes the estimator will update it. The estimator assumes the account manager will, because the customer contacted them. Two days later the customer phones again. Meanwhile, in the same business, two people in finance spend a morning each reconciling the same supplier statement, because both thought it was theirs.

Unclear responsibility produces three failures at once. Some work is done twice. Some work waits while people work out whose it is. And some work is never done at all, because everyone assumed someone else had it. Each failure is small. Together, across a team and a year, they add up to a lot of paid time and a steady trickle of customer disappointment.

Why businesses tolerate it

Roles grew organically. People took on tasks as the business grew, and nobody updated the picture of who does what.
Job descriptions describe titles, not tasks. A document saying "administrator" does not say who sends the monthly statements.
Helpfulness hides gaps. Willing employees step in, which works until two of them step in at once, or neither does.
The cost is spread thin. An hour of duplication here and a delayed reply there never appear as one line item.
Nobody wants to look territorial. Asking "is this mine or yours?" can feel awkward, so people guess.

How widespread the problem is

Role clarity is weaker than many managers assume. In an article on performance management, Gallup reports that, across its research with 550 organisations and 2.2 million employees, only about half of employees strongly indicate that they know what is expected of them at work. If half the team is unsure what is expected, unclear ownership of individual tasks is likely to be common.

In South Africa there is also a legal baseline for describing work. Section 29 of the Basic Conditions of Employment Act requires an employer to give an employee written particulars of employment, including the employee's occupation or a brief description of the work for which they are employed. That is a minimum, not a solution: a brief description of a job rarely settles who owns a particular recurring task between two colleagues.

Operational symptoms

"I thought you were doing it" after a missed deadline;
two people replying to the same customer email, sometimes with different answers;
tasks that sit in a shared inbox or channel because nobody is sure they should pick them up;
work redone because each person had a different idea of what "done" meant;
managers acting as dispatchers, assigning routine tasks one at a time;
recurring tasks, such as renewals, reconciliations or follow-ups, missed when a person is away.

Shared inboxes show the problem most clearly; customer requests lost in a shared inbox covers that specific case. The broader cause is described in why work gets lost between teams.

How the pain becomes money

Labour cost of duplication: two people paid to do one piece of work.
Delay cost: time lost while ownership is worked out, which slows quotes, invoices and service.
Cost of dropped work: missed follow-ups, renewals and deadlines that reach customers or suppliers, sometimes with penalties or lost sales.
Management overhead: managers spending time allocating routine work that should allocate itself.
Conflict and morale: friction between colleagues when blame is assigned after the fact.

There is a quieter cost too. When ownership is vague, capable employees hold back from tasks in case they step on someone's toes, while less careful ones charge ahead and create rework. Performance conversations become difficult, because a manager cannot fairly hold someone accountable for work that was never clearly theirs. Over time, the most conscientious people end up doing the most, which is a common route to burnout and resignation.

An illustrative cost model

This example is illustrative. Every figure is an assumption for a hypothetical business. Picture a Cape Town property management company with 25 staff.

Assumption	Value
Staff affected	20
Hours per person per week lost to duplication and ownership confusion	1.5
Average loaded hourly cost	R260
Manager hours per week allocating routine work	4 hours at R550
Dropped-work incidents per month with a direct cost (missed renewals, late notices, credits)	2 at R4,000 each
Working weeks per year	46

Duplication and confusion: 20 × 1.5 × R260 × 46 = R358,800
Manager allocation time: 4 × R550 × 46 = R101,200
Dropped work: 2 × R4,000 × 12 = R96,000
Illustrative total: R556,000 a year

Every input can be checked. Ask the team to note, for two weeks, each time they did something someone else had already done, or waited to find out whose job something was. Review the last quarter's complaints for anything that was dropped between people.

When it becomes commercially urgent

customer complaints mention conflicting answers or nobody following up;
the team has grown or been restructured and roles were not redrawn;
a recurring compliance or contractual task has been missed;
managers say they cannot step away because things fall through the cracks;
the business is about to automate a process whose ownership is unclear.

The last point matters. Automating a task that nobody owns produces an automation that nobody watches, which is a more expensive version of the same problem.

What better looks like

Responsibilities are listed at task level. Not just job titles, but the recurring tasks each person owns.
Every recurring task has one owner and one backup. Shared ownership means no ownership.
"Done" is defined. For handoffs, both sides agree what a finished piece of work looks like.
Incoming work is assigned by rule. Requests are routed by type, client or region, not by whoever notices first.
Gaps are reviewed regularly. Unowned tasks are surfaced and assigned before they cause a failure.

Atlassian's Team Playbook describes a simple workshop for this in its roles and responsibilities play. Each person writes down what they think their responsibilities are, colleagues add what they think each role covers, and the team reviews unassigned items together. The play explicitly aims to reduce duplicated effort and bring unassigned responsibilities into the open.

Practical next actions

Run a one-hour session with each team: list the recurring tasks, then ask who owns each one. Disagreements and blanks are the findings.
Write a one-page responsibility list per team with an owner and a backup for every recurring task.
Set routing rules for shared inboxes and request channels so items are assigned on arrival.
Agree a definition of done for the three handoffs that cause most rework.
Review the list whenever someone joins, leaves or changes role.
Store the list where everyone can find it, not in a manager's notebook.

The Insights article how to design workflows that can survive staff changes builds on this once ownership is clear.

Bottom line

Unclear responsibility is one of the cheapest problems in a business to fix and one of the most expensive to ignore. It quietly pays two people for one job, delays work while ownership is debated and lets important tasks fall to no one. A short exercise to list tasks, name owners and route incoming work by rule recovers paid time and stops avoidable failures from reaching customers.

Sources and further reading

How to Define Team Roles and Responsibilities - Atlassian (last verified 10 October 2026)
Obsolete Annual Reviews: Gallup's Advice (last verified 10 October 2026)
https://www.labour.gov.za/DocumentCenter/Acts/Basic%20Conditions%20of%20Employment/Act%20-%20Basic%20Conditions%20of%20Employment.pdf (last verified 10 October 2026)