How automation stops employees doing low-value work

Your team are busy, right? Of course they are – they always are! But busy doing what, exactly? Because:

There are meetings happening.

Reports are being produced.

Projects moving forward.

Yet despite all of this activity, leaders often have the same lingering feeling:

We should be further ahead than we are. Maybe further ahead in projects, further ahead in targets, or further ahead in growth. Whatever the context, you feel you should be… further ahead.

• Productivity hasn’t increased as much as expected
• Processes still feel slow
• Highly skilled employees spend large portions of their day on work that doesn’t seem particularly valuable

In many cases, the problem isn’t a lack of talent, effort, or even technology. It’s something far simpler.

Your best people are spending their time doing work that shouldn’t require a human at all. Let’s explain.

The Hidden Productivity Problem in Many Businesses

Most organisations don’t intentionally design workflows where highly skilled employees perform low-value tasks. It happens over time.

A company starts small

Processes evolve organically

People fill in gaps where needed

The work gets done, results are achieved, and the small business does grow. Gradually, though, more manual steps begin to accumulate.

• Managers chase updates from colleagues
• Engineers compile data for reports
• Designers complete internal documentation

None of these tasks are inherently wrong. They need to be done. But they never require the expertise of the person performing them. Often, they don’t require a human at all!

For example, if you’ve hired graphic designers, you pay them to design graphics… not to spend a considerable chunk of their time dealing with paperwork. Yet this is an issue we faced recently with a marketing client. Their process meant their Lead Graphic Designer had to deal with paperwork that could have been automated.

And this is exactly what happens in many organisations.

Highly skilled employees become responsible for coordinating information, managing internal processes, and handling administrative tasks that slowly consume their time.

What This Actually Looks Like Inside a Business

This isn’t a theoretical problem. It shows up in very real, very practical ways inside organisations.

We often see finance teams manually processing invoices, checking data line by line, and chasing approvals across multiple systems.

We see engineers spending time gathering information from different platforms before they can even begin solving a problem.

We see teams manipulating spreadsheets for hours just to prepare data for reporting.

None of this work is particularly complex. But it is time consuming. And because it sits inside the workflow, it becomes part of the day-to-day role.

Over time, these small tasks build up. What starts as a minor administrative step becomes a significant portion of someone’s workload. And that’s where the real inefficiency lies.

How Businesses Accidentally Create Low-Value Work

The root of the problem usually lies in how processes develop as businesses grow.

In the early stages of a company, informal workflows work perfectly well.

People communicate directly.
Updates happen quickly.
Everyone knows what is going on.

But as the organisation grows, the amount of work inside the business grows with it. More customers means:

• More projects
• More reporting
• More coordination
• More internal communication

If those processes remain manual, the only way to manage the additional workload is to involve more people. It quickly becomes a loop: businesses grow, it becomes more work, more personnel… more work, more personnel… and so on.

Eventually, employees start spending a significant portion of their time simply keeping the organisation running. And that’s not growth. In fact, it could be the opposite.

The “We’ve Always Done It This Way” Problem

One of the biggest reasons low-value work continues to exist is simply because no one has stopped to question it.

A real-world example we saw in one of our clients was;

• Step 1: The employee printed sales orders and handwrote an invoice number on the document.
• Step 2: The employee then scanned that document back into the system, filed it and emailed it to the relevant colleague.
• Step 3: This was done this up to 80 times a day.

When we came in with a fresh pair of eyes, we asked “Why do you do this?” and the response was “That’s just how we’ve always done it”… or at least that’s what they had been told by the process, the same process said because the Finance Department required it.

So we asked the Finance Department why they needed this invoice number handwritten on the document…
“We don’t.”

Why that step entered the process in the first place, we’ll never know, but it had, and was now causing administrative drag for literally no reason.

In many cases, those steps are no longer needed. But because they’ve never been challenged, or employees communicated to each other, they continue to consume time and effort across the business.

The Real Cost of Low-Value Work

When talented employees spend large amounts of time on repetitive or administrative tasks, the impact is larger than many businesses realise.

1. Reduced productivity

Highly paid employees spend time on tasks that add little value.

Instead of doing what they’re paid to do (Marketing Managers that analyse data, Graphic Designers that design graphics, or Financial Heads optimising budgets), they’re compiling information or managing internal processes.

2. Slower business growth

When operational work increases, businesses often respond by hiring more people.

But if payroll grows at the same rate as revenue, the organisation isn’t becoming more efficient. It’s simply becoming bigger. Issues are scaling at the same rate as pay and income (remember, this isn’t growth).

3. Lower employee satisfaction

Most professionals enjoy the core work they were hired to do.

Recruiters want to recruit.
Engineers want to solve technical problems.
Salespeople want to build relationships with customers.

Repetitive administrative work rarely motivates anyone. So, you want employees focused on the areas of their role that bring the most value to the company.

How do you achieve that? First, you’ve got to get to the root cause of the issue. And you must understand why the problem has got to where it is.

Why the Problem Gets Worse as Companies Scale

Low-value work tends to grow almost unnoticed inside organisations.

A process that initially takes ten minutes can slowly expand as the business grows.

For example:

• One report becomes five reports
• One project update becomes weekly status meetings
• One spreadsheet becomes a complex reporting process

Ultimately, if you spend ten hours a week chasing project updates, that turns into fifteen… then twenty… then thirty. Eventually, entire roles emerge simply to manage internal coordination.

This creates what many organisations experience as operational drag — the feeling that progress is slower than it should be despite increasing effort from the team.

So, how do you prevent this?

Where Workflow Automation Should Be Helping

This is exactly where automation should play a role.

The purpose of automation isn’t to replace skilled employees.

It’s to remove the repetitive work that surrounds them.

Automation is particularly effective for tasks that follow the same set of rules each time, such as:

• Collecting data from multiple systems
• Routing approvals through workflows
• Generating regular reports
• Tracking project updates
• Transferring information between platforms

Instead of people chasing information manually, systems can collect it automatically. So an engineer who was spending an hour gathering data on technical problems can now spend that hour working on the issue, with all the data in front of them. Likewise, a salesperson who would spend 2-3 hours researching a new client, can now spend those 2-3 hours with that new client with all the information in front of them.

When workflows are designed properly, the process itself handles the coordination.

Employees simply interact with the output. This increases the very important, productivity per employee metric.

Why Small Changes Create Big Productivity Gains

One of the biggest misconceptions about automation is that it requires large, complex projects to deliver value.

In reality, some of the most impactful changes are the simplest.

Removing a single manual step from a process that happens every day can save hours each week. Just think how much time was saved in our earlier-mentioned example… Automating a small piece of data collection can eliminate the need for multiple people to chase information.

These small changes add up quickly.

More importantly, they build momentum.

Once a team sees that a simple change can save hours of work, it changes how they think. They start looking for other opportunities. They start questioning existing processes.

And that’s when real transformation begins.

The Productivity per Employee Metric

One of the most important measures of operational efficiency is productivity per employee.

This metric measures the value each person in the organisation can produce.

Technology, particularly automation, plays a major role in improving this.

When repetitive tasks are removed from workflows (such as data gathering, information finding… all of the aforementioned), employees can focus their time on activities that actually move the business forward.

This is one thing that high-performing businesses do differently. But here’s how they do it.

How High-Performing Businesses Design Efficient Workflows

The most efficient organisations design workflows so that systems handle the operational work and people focus on the valuable work.

Consider a simple example.

Imagine a growing services company that manages dozens of active client projects.

Every week, someone needs to compile updates from project managers to produce a status report for leadership.

In many businesses, this process looks something like this:

1. A coordinator emails project managers asking for updates
2. Project managers respond at different times during the week
3. The coordinator manually compiles those updates into a report
4. Leadership reviews the report at the end of the week

This might take several hours each week. As the number of projects grows, so does the workload.

But with a properly designed workflow, the process could look very different.

1. Project managers submit updates directly into a structured system
2. That information automatically feeds into a central dashboard
3. Reports generate automatically based on the data submitted

Instead of chasing updates and compiling information, the coordinator can focus on analysing the data and identifying issues early.

The work hasn’t disappeared. But the nature of the work has changed.

Administrative tasks are automated, while employees focus on activities that require judgement and expertise.

Just wait until you introduce artificial intelligence on top of automation to help the coordinator analyse the data.

How to Identify Low-Value Work in Your Organisation

Fixing this isn’t a technology problem.

It’s easy to assume that solving this problem starts with technology. It doesn’t. In reality, it starts with understanding how work flows through your business. A good place to start is by identifying where low-value work exists.

The most effective way to identify these opportunities is to bring people together from different departments and simply talk through what they do.

Not from a technical perspective. From an operational one.

• What tasks do they complete each day?
• Where do they spend time chasing information?
• What frustrates them about their role?

These conversations often reveal inefficiencies that no one realised existed.

In many cases, small improvements to workflows can free up significant amounts of time across the organisation. As well as increasing employees’ motivation by taking more administrative work off their shoulders. All of which, have a huge and lasting impact on the productivity per employee metric.

Why Redesigning Workflows Unlocks Real Productivity

When leaders look at productivity challenges inside their organisation, it’s easy to assume the problem lies with people.

In reality, it’s often the processes surrounding those people that create the issue. Remember: a broken or bad process will only be amplified by AI and automation – ensure you review process first, before diving in and introducing automation.

The organisations that improve productivity the most aren’t the ones that simply hire more people. They are the ones that take managing these processes and workflows off highly skilled employees and allow them to contribute their expertise.

They’re the ones who redesign how work flows through the business.

Because when repetitive tasks are automated and processes are structured properly, your best employees can finally focus on what they were hired to do.

And that’s where the real value is created.

This is something AAG IT Services can support with, contact us today to see how we can help you on your automation journey.