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CPS-005 · Impact

When High-Value Employees Spend Their Time on Low-Value Admin — and the Capacity Cost Hidden in Payroll

Expensive expertise creates poor leverage when skilled people repeatedly spend paid hours copying data, chasing routine information, formatting documents or administering work that could be simplified.

Mellorca Impact·Productivity & Operations·4 September 2026

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.

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.

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.

Commercial triggerIf scarce specialists routinely perform repeatable clerical work, the process is consuming expensive capacity even when no new invoice appears.

Resolution

  1. Sample how specialist time is actually spent.
  2. Separate judgement from repeatable administration.
  3. Remove unnecessary steps before automating.
  4. Standardise inputs, templates and handoffs.
  5. Automate only stable, observable repeatable work.
  6. Track specialist time returned to higher-value activity.

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.