Wage war on admin

Dave Heywood (00:00)
If we’re asking more of people, what are we prepared to make easier in return? This is Scale, an OX7 Partners Podcast, and I’m Dave Heywood

I think this is probably one of the more important questions I’ve come across in my years in the industry. And I still don’t hear it talked about that often.

What we do tend to focus on though is that first half of the equation. Better data, better reporting, deeper customer insight, more collaboration, governance, forecasting, CRM discipline, you name it. None of those are bad things in themselves. In fact, they’re all things that I’ve wanted from teams and colleagues and partners that I’ve worked with.

But what I have noticed is that all too often every new expectation seems to come without anything ever getting taken off the plate.

The work just accumulates and builds over time, You get to the end of the day and you’ve been busy from the moment you’ve opened your laptop, replied to emails, Teams messages, updated CRM, chased approvals, sat in three or four meetings,

But essentially if somebody asked you what meaningful progress you’d made on some of your priorities, you’d probably struggle.

and not through lack of effort.

Quite the opposite. And actually Asana calls it work about work. and Microsoft uses the phrase digital debt.

Now I’m always slightly suspicious when looking at research from productivity software companies talking about productivity, but I think the broader point they’re making is quite right. Microsoft found that people overwhelmed by meetings, emails and notifications were much less likely to say that they had

time or energy for strategic thinking and that’s not a surprise because

All those little admin jobs don’t just consume time they take attention.

every interruption, context switching and unnecessary handoff chips away at the ability To think clearly and long term.

And so that’s got me wondering whether we’ve slightly misunderstood one of the responsibilities of leadership.

We spend a lot of time talking about and setting expectations and raising standards, but perhaps our role isn’t just to raise standards it’s also to make it easier for people to meet them.

That idea really crystallized for me personally during a CRM project that I led. We wanted to be far more disciplined about relationship management. Better notes better visibility of key client relationships, more useful intelligence both from sales and marketing. Yeah, that sort of information that actually genuinely helps people.

have better conversations, keep close to their clients, and ultimately helps the business make better commercial decisions. And there was no point me pretending that this wasn’t significantly asking more of people. adding adding some useful client notes does take longer than writing good meeting with X keeping information up to date.

It takes effort. So I had a choice. I could either tell everyone they now had another thing to do,

Or I could ask myself a slightly different question. If I’m asking people to spend another five minutes doing something that genuinely creates value, what am I prepared to make easier in return? And that completely changed how we approached the project, both practically and through rollout.

Instead of treating this as a pure CRM implementation, w we also conducted a little bit of a friction audit. We looked at some of those key points where people had to move information between systems, every manual notification that someone had to fire off, every duplicate update where people are essentially readding information from one system to another.

what I was hunting for was every point where a human being was acting as that integration layer because two bits of software or two processes just didn’t talk to each other and mesh. So we automated the handoff into our project management and billing system. Notifications happened automatically.

records synchronized between systems. We removed as much duplicate entry as we possibly could. We pre-notified IT to set up project spaces so an individual didn’t have to.

So while people still needed to provide the data that gave us better, smarter customer intelligence,

And they still needed to have those good conversations and capture what really mattered and what we expected. The amount of pointless effort surrounding that work came down quite dramatically.

And I I think that’s a much healthier bargain to make with people.

It also helped me think a little bit differently about AI and automation more broadly.

Yeah, a lot of the conversation always revolves around replacing jobs. Actually I d I don’t think that’s the most impactful opportunity here. The opportunity is all around removing the work, that actually arguably probably never needed a human in the first place.

So at the end of the day, w we spend an awful lot of time thinking about how to raise the ceiling and standards. How do we find exceptional people? How do we create superstar performance? all really reasonable questions. But I wonder if there’s another one we should ask a little more often. How do we make it easier for everyone to consistently do good work?

And that’s what removing a lot of this friction does. It doesn’t make talented people less talented. It just gives more people the chance to spend the time on the things that actually matter and w they might actually enjoy and add more

value.

And so if you’re listening to this and wondering, that sounds all great, but where do I start? I’ve got a couple of suggestions. First is to run

what we’ll call a friction audit. Pick one important process in your business. Customer onboarding, campaign approvals, monthly reporting, anything, it doesn’t really matter. But ask yourself four questions around that. Where are people copying information from one system to another? Where are they entering that same information twice? Where are they waiting for another human

Where technology could do the job. And if you were designing this process from scratch today, with AI and automation tools available, would you honestly build it the same way? You’ll probably surprise yourself with just how much unnecessary effort has crept in over the years. And my second suggestion

is one I’d encourage everyone to ask before introducing a new initiative. Before we ask for yet another report, another meeting, another approval, another CRM process. Stop and ask yourself if I’m asking more of people, what am I prepared to make easier in return?

I think that’s a far more healthy question than simply asking whether people can understand and implement yet another process.

‘Cause at the end of the day, we are far more effective when we’re able to spend quality time thinking, solving problems, building relationships and serving customers better.

But the only way we’ll get there is if we become far more deliberate about removing some of that pointless work

So let’s wage war on admin. Hope you found that useful. This is Scale, an OX7 Partners podcast. I’m Dave Heywood and I’ll see you next time.