Written by: David Carneal – Digital Efficiency Consulting Group – DECG
Read Time: 3 min
Busy is not the same as productive
One of the most dangerous phrases in operations is, ‘Everyone is working hard.’ That may be true. It may also be completely irrelevant.
A team can be buried in activity and still lose hours every day to re-entry, clarification, error correction, and status chasing. None of that looks lazy. It just looks expensive.
That is how companies end up feeling understaffed even while paying for a surprising amount of work that creates zero customer value.
The ugly part is that fake productivity is socially rewarded for a while. Everyone appears committed. Everyone looks maxed out. Meanwhile, the process keeps quietly consuming payroll without producing cleaner output, faster service, or better visibility.
Where fake productivity hides
- Correcting preventable mistakes
- If bad data enters early, multiple people may touch the fallout later.
- Hunting for missing information
- Every interruption to chase a detail resets focus and slows cycle time.
- Maintaining shadow trackers
- When the official system is not trusted, someone builds a side spreadsheet and now everyone serves two masters.
- Explaining handoffs
- Teams spend time translating work for each other because the process itself does not carry enough context.
A five-point friction score
Score each item from 1 to 5. One means rarely. Five means all the time.
- We re-enter information between systems
- We spend time fixing errors created upstream
- We depend on spreadsheets to know what is really happening
- We lose time waiting on approvals or missing details
- Our best people spend too much time on workarounds
A total above 15 is not subtle. It means capacity is being eaten by friction before the real work even gets a chance.
If leaders never separate value-creating work from process-maintenance work, they end up funding both as if they were equally important. They are not. One serves the customer. The other serves the dysfunction.
Why this matters to leaders
Friction drains morale as much as it drains money. Good employees usually do not burn out because they hate work. They burn out because the work keeps asking them to compensate for a broken process.
When a company mistakes that pain for a pure staffing shortage, it risks hiring more people into the same mess instead of reducing the mess itself.
The win here is not squeezing harder. It is removing waste so the same team can spend more of the day doing work that actually matters. Funny how morale improves when adults stop spending half the morning apologizing to a spreadsheet.
CTA: Use the friction score in your next leadership meeting. It is a lot cheaper than another round of ‘why is everyone so busy?’ followed by strategic blinking.