Your Most Expensive Employee May Be the One Doing £15-an-Hour Work

Businesses can spend weeks negotiating a senior hire’s salary. Is £65,000 sensible? What does the market pay? Then, three months later, that same person is spending Friday afternoon copying figures between spreadsheets, chasing an approval and rebuilding a report that apparently “has always been done this way”.

The problem is not that administrative work is beneath them. Most businesses would stop functioning remarkably quickly if nobody did the unglamorous jobs.

The problem is paying for specialist judgement and then using a meaningful chunk of that expensive capacity on work that does not require it.

What an Employee Costs Is Only Half the Question

Office for National Statistics figures put median hourly earnings for full-time UK employees at £19.67 in April 2025, 5.4% higher than a year earlier. Median annual earnings reached £39,039.

Meanwhile, the CIPD's latest Labour Market Outlook found cost management was the top priority for 58% of employers in spring 2026, with improving productivity second at 44%.

Businesses are therefore asking plenty of questions about how much people cost. The less obvious question is what they are buying with those salaries.

A company may be reluctant to add another £5,000 to a specialist's salary while barely noticing that the same person loses several hours each week to processes designed when the business was half its current size.

The salary appears neatly in the accounts. Misallocated expertise does not.

The Bigger Cost Is the Work That Never Gets Done

Suppose a senior consultant spends two hours building a recurring client report manually.

It is tempting to calculate the cost by taking their salary, converting it into an hourly rate and multiplying by two. That gets you a number, but probably not the important one.

What could those two hours have produced instead?

Perhaps the consultant could have spotted a problem in the client's account, helped a junior colleague, prepared for a renewal conversation or done work the client would actually pay for.

That is the real sting. When skilled employees spend time on routine work, the business pays twice: once for the hours consumed and again through the more valuable activity that never happened.

This is why apparently small inefficiencies can be surprisingly expensive.

Nobody calls an emergency board meeting because the finance manager spent 25 minutes hunting for the correct version of a document. It is just 25 minutes. Then it happens again on Tuesday. And Thursday. To three other people.

Corporate waste rarely arrives wearing a flashing hat marked CORPORATE WASTE. More often, it looks completely normal.

How Do Expensive People End Up Doing Low-Leverage Work?

Usually, nobody planned it.

A founder handled invoices when the company employed five people and somehow still approves every minor exception at 50. A senior account manager became the unofficial owner of a spreadsheet because she was the only person who understood it. An engineer built a workaround between two systems and, three years later, remains the human integration layer.

Competence can actually make the problem worse.

Reliable employees attract miscellaneous tasks because everyone knows they will get them done. The reward for knowing how a fiddly internal process works is often being asked to perform that fiddly internal process forever.

Growth adds another complication. Informal ways of working can survive surprisingly well in a small company because everyone knows who does what. As teams expand, the same arrangements become harder to see and harder to question. Business Age has previously explored this wider challenge of leaders staying close to the people actually delivering the work.

By the time an inefficient task becomes obviously expensive, it may already have become part of the furniture.

Before You Automate It, Ask Whether It Should Exist

The fashionable response to repetitive work is, inevitably, AI.

Sometimes that is sensible. Sometimes it is simply an impressively modern way to automate something nobody needed in the first place.

Before asking what software can do a task, businesses should ask a more awkward question: why are we doing it at all?

A recurring process might be eliminated because nobody uses its output. It might be simplified by removing three approvals. It might belong with another role. It might be suitable for automation. Or it might genuinely need the experienced employee currently handling it.

As Business Age has previously argued in its guide to automating a growing business, fixing the process should come before accelerating it. A broken workflow does not become clever merely because software can now complete it faster.

This is also where managers need to resist an easy trap. “We saved ten hours” sounds impressive in a presentation, but a time saving has no automatic commercial value. What happens to those hours next is what matters.

Visibility Should Not Mean Watching Every Minute

There is, however, an obvious problem with fixing misplaced effort: first you have to know where the effort is going.

That does not require managers to turn into workplace detectives, peering suspiciously at a dashboard because somebody disappeared from Microsoft Teams for seven minutes.

The useful level of visibility is broader. Which projects repeatedly absorb more senior input than expected? Which clients generate unusual amounts of administration? Where do approvals stall? Which recurring jobs somehow require the intervention of the same highly paid person every month?

A spokesperson for Timesheet Portal puts the distinction this way: “Businesses tend to know exactly what an employee costs, but often have much less visibility into what that expensive capacity is actually being used for.”

Time data becomes much more useful when it is treated as information about projects, costs and processes, rather than a scorecard of who appeared busiest.

The aim is not to catch somebody spending too long making tea. Frankly, the tea may be holding the operation together.

The Value of Saving Time Depends on What Happens Next

There is encouraging evidence that removing routine work can change what people do with their day.

A 2026 Department for Work and Pensions evaluation of Microsoft 365 Copilot estimated that users saved an average of 19 minutes per day across eight routine tasks. Importantly, staff reported redirecting some of that time towards work including project delivery, strategic planning and supporting senior leaders.

The interesting part is not the 19 minutes. It is what replaced them.

That is the test businesses should apply when reviewing any process. Removing an hour of administration only creates meaningful value if the reclaimed hour has somewhere better to go.

So perhaps the most useful question for a management team is not, “How can we make everyone work faster?”

It is this:

If you gave your most expensive employees five hours back next week, what would you want them to do with them?

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