Written by: David Carneal – Digital Efficiency Consulting Group – DECG
Read Time: 2 min
The better question
Instead of asking, ‘Do we need more people?’ ask, ‘Why does this process require so many people?’ That small shift changes the conversation from reaction to diagnosis.
It moves leaders away from treating symptoms and toward understanding how work actually moves, where it stalls, and why the team keeps absorbing friction as if it were part of the job description.
That wording matters because headcount discussions often start too late, after the pain is already loud. By then, everyone wants relief. A better question forces the room to examine whether the relief should come from more labor, better design, or both.
What that question reveals
- Duplicate work that nobody notices because it has become routine
- Approvals that exist out of habit rather than value
- Poorly defined ownership between departments
- Manual transfers between tools that should already be connected
- Reliance on a few experienced employees to translate the mess for everyone else
Once leaders see those patterns, the conversation changes. The issue is no longer "people are overloaded" in the abstract. The issue becomes "this process keeps manufacturing extra labor demand." That is a much more useful problem statement.
A leadership review framework
- Ask the team to map the workflow visually
- Identify where work waits, loops back, or gets corrected
- Separate customer-value work from process-maintenance work
- Estimate what portion of labor exists only because the workflow is inefficient
- Then decide whether the right answer is redesign, automation, training, or actual headcount
This approach protects good hiring decisions too. Sometimes you really do need more people. The difference is that now you will know whether you are adding capacity to a healthy process or subsidizing a broken one.
Why this matters financially
Every unnecessary hire becomes a recurring cost. Salary, benefits, onboarding, supervision, and added complexity do not disappear just because the original process was never fixed.
When leaders ask better questions first, they protect both the team and the budget. They also avoid the classic move of buying more capacity for a process that keeps leaking it out the bottom like a shopping cart with one square wheel.
That is why workflow review belongs before requisition approval whenever possible. It is not bureaucracy. It is basic self-defense for the business.
CTA: Before the next requisition gets approved, require a workflow review. It is not anti-hiring. It is anti-paying forever for work that should have been redesigned months ago.