How Many Billable Hours Are Your Highest-Paid Employees Spending on Minimum-Wage Tasks?
Imagine employing an experienced engineer, solicitor, accountant or consultant on £50,000 a year...
...then asking them to spend two hours every day copying information between systems, updating spreadsheets, chasing paperwork, checking addresses, or retyping information that's already stored somewhere else.
Most businesses wouldn't do it deliberately. Yet it happens every day. When managers talk about being "short staffed", they're often describing a shortage of productive hours—not people.
Before advertising your next vacancy, ask a different question:
How much of your team's time is being spent on work that creates little or no value?
The Hidden Cost of Administrative Work
Business owners usually know how much they spend on salaries. Far fewer know how those salaries are actually being used. Across many SMEs, highly skilled employees regularly spend part of their day:
- Copying information between systems
- Updating CRMs
- Chasing customers for missing information
- Checking forms for errors
- Re-entering invoices
- Booking appointments
- Producing routine reports
- Searching for documents
- Following up overdue tasks
- Manually moving data from one spreadsheet to another
None of these jobs are particularly difficult.
Most aren't why those employees were hired.
Expensive Time Is Often Wasted Time
A £50,000 employee costs significantly more than their salary once National Insurance, pension contributions, training, office space and equipment are included.
Every hour spent on repetitive administration has two costs.
The obvious cost is paying someone to complete it.
The hidden cost is what they could have been doing instead.
For a consultancy, that's lost billable time.
For a sales team, it's fewer customer conversations.
For a director, it's less strategic thinking.
For customer service, it's longer response times.
The opportunity cost is usually far greater than the wage cost.
The Biggest Mistake SMEs Make
When workloads increase, the instinctive response is often:
"We need another person."
Sometimes that's true.
Often it isn't.
Many growing businesses have never measured how much time is consumed by repetitive administration before deciding to recruit. Hiring another employee to support inefficient processes simply allows the inefficiency to continue at a larger scale.
The Five Tasks to Audit First
If you're considering recruitment, start by measuring how much time is spent on:
1. Copying information
Moving data between emails, spreadsheets, CRM systems and accounting software.
2. Checking information
Validating addresses, invoices, forms and customer details.
3. Chasing people
Following up missing documents, approvals or payments.
4. Repetitive data entry
Typing information already held elsewhere.
5. Routine reporting
Creating the same reports every week or month.
These are often ideal candidates for automation, system integration or workflow redesign.
Automation Isn't About Replacing People
This is where many businesses misunderstand AI and automation. The goal isn't to replace experienced employees. It's to remove the repetitive work that prevents them from using their expertise.
Your best people should be making decisions, solving problems, serving customers and growing the business—not acting as human middleware between disconnected systems.
A Simple Exercise
Choose three experienced employees. Ask each of them to record every task they perform over three working days. Highlight every activity that involves:
- Copying
- Checking
- Chasing
- Typing
- Updating
- Searching
- Scheduling
Estimate the total hours per week (divide by 3 and multiply by 5).
Now add up their cost to you per hour (that's what you're paying them to do repetitive work) and their billable cost to a customer per hour (that's what you're unable to charge because they are doing other non-billable work). Multiply that by the total hours per week and then again by 48 weeks (allowing for holidays)
Now ask:
What could those people achieve if they got even half of that time back?The answer is often worth far more than the cost of implementing better systems.
Click here and do the calculation yourself, see what the costs are for you.
GeekyBee Recommendation
Before hiring another employee, audit where your existing employees spend their time.
If highly skilled staff are spending hours every week copying data, chasing updates, checking records or completing routine administration, don't assume you need more people. You may simply need better processes, integrated systems or carefully targeted automation.
Technology shouldn't replace expertise—it should remove the repetitive work that prevents expertise from creating value.
Conclusion
Businesses rarely become more productive by adding people to inefficient processes. They become more productive by removing unnecessary work.
Before approving your next recruitment budget, spend one week measuring where your most valuable employees actually spend their time. You may discover your biggest productivity gain isn't another salary.
It's eliminating the minimum-wage tasks hiding inside your highest-paid roles.
