The “Adminification” of Work
Everywhere you turn in the agency world (and corporate world more broadly), senior talent seems increasingly buried under an avalanche of administrative tasks - emails, status meetings, and repetitive reports - and it seems to be getting worse and worse with each passing year. I’m calling this trend the "adminification" of work, and it's draining both morale and profit from most agencies.
If you're an agency owner, leader, or senior-level professional, you likely understand firsthand how excessive administrative work can prevent talented team members from leveraging their strategic insight, technical expertise, or creativity. Feeling trapped in administrative minutiae not only demotivates employees but also limits their ability to deliver the high-value work that clients expect and pay premium rates for.
One likely root cause of adminification is the lack of clearly defined differences in roles and responsibilities between junior and senior-level positions within specialty areas. When roles aren't sufficiently differentiated, senior-level employees end up handling tasks that closely resemble those performed by junior staff, particularly in administrative areas. This not only creates frustration among senior team members but also significantly dilutes the value that clients expect when paying premium rates.
When your experienced team spends significant portions of their day on tasks better suited for administrative or junior staff, you risk billing clients premium rates for low-value activities. Over time, this erodes client satisfaction, undermines the financial health of your agency, and increases turnover among your senior-level talent.
To combat the adminification trend and refocus your agency's talent on strategic and revenue-generating activities, consider taking the following deliberate steps:
Audit Administrative Tasks: Start by closely examining your agency’s workflows. Use time-tracking tools, internal surveys, and employee interviews to differentiate strategic tasks (such as client strategy sessions, creative direction, and new business development) from purely administrative tasks (meeting recaps, basic reporting, routine email management, and data entry). Understanding these distinctions will help you realign responsibilities effectively.
Delegate and Automate: Once you've identified administrative burdens, actively delegate tasks such as meeting/calendar management, basic client follow-ups, and routine communications to administrative staff or junior team members who can handle these tasks more efficiently. Embrace automation tools or AI when possible to help further reduce the administrative burden of day-to-day responsibilities.
Hire Internal Operational Support: If you find that certain administrative tasks are critical to your business operations, consider hiring dedicated, non-billable operational roles. These positions can specialize in handling internal administrative duties, clearly aligning administrative work with support staff, which frees up senior talent to focus on client-facing and strategic activities.
Centralize and Standardize Documentation: Create centralized, standardized templates and documentation to reduce redundancy and improve efficiency. Implement standardized status reports, client updates, proposal templates, and other frequently used documents so your teams aren't continually reinventing processes or documentation ad-hoc. Centralization ensures consistency and streamlines your administrative workflows.
Protect Senior Roles: Ensure your senior-level talent spends most of their time on strategic, high-impact tasks. Clearly define roles and responsibilities to protect senior staff from becoming overwhelmed by administrative duties. This realignment will increase both employee satisfaction and your agency’s profitability.
Addressing adminification isn't just about efficiency; it's about preserving your best talent, maintaining client satisfaction, and securing your agency's financial health. Investing in streamlining and optimizing how your team spends their time will deliver measurable benefits in talent retention, client outcomes, and overall agency success.