A reliable employee can make an unreliable process look good. The customer gets an answer. The order goes out. The mistake is caught before anyone notices. From the outside, the company works. Inside, somebody has rescued it again.
The experienced colleague knows which folder contains the current file. A salesperson maintains a private spreadsheet because the official customer record is incomplete. A project manager reminds everyone what happens next. The owner spots a doubtful number because experience says it cannot be right.
These are not signs of weak employees. They are signs of capable people carrying work that the company has never organized reliably. In the October 13 LinkedIn post behind this article, I asked where a business’s best employees are still compensating for a process that should already work better. The important word is still.
The result is visible. The rescue work is not.
Most businesses track the output: quotations sent, orders delivered, projects completed, invoices issued. Much less visible is the work required to get those outputs over the line. Looking for a missing attachment. Checking which price list is current. Re-entering a customer address. Asking whether somebody has approved the change.
Each workaround looks small and sensible on its own. Together they become a second job running underneath the first. The project manager is not only managing the project. She is also maintaining the reminders that hold it together. The salesperson is not only selling. He is repairing the information needed to sell.
The company pays for that work through salaries, interruptions and delayed decisions. It rarely receives an invoice marked “avoidable friction”. That makes the cost easy to miss.
Your best people should add judgment to the business, not act as its missing filing system.
Before hiring, separate capacity from friction
Sometimes the answer really is another person. A healthy order book and a consistently well-run operation can outgrow the available capacity. Hiring is then a reasonable decision. But adding a person to an unclear workflow does not make the workflow clear.
The new hire needs the same missing information, asks the same experienced colleague and builds another private list. Output may increase, but so does the coordination needed to produce it. The original employee becomes busier teaching the workarounds instead of escaping them.
Before calling this a staffing shortage, look at what people spend their time recovering. Is it genuine demand that needs more capacity, or recurring searching, chasing, checking and correcting? Often it is a mixture. Treating the two as the same problem leads to the wrong investment.
Follow one piece of work from start to finish
Do not begin with a company-wide software comparison. Pick a recurring workflow that matters commercially: an enquiry becoming a quotation, a confirmed order becoming a delivery, or a finished job becoming an invoice. Walk through a real recent example with the people who handled it.
- 1.
Where does the information arrive?
Identify the email, form, call or message that starts the work. Can the next person find the full information without asking around?
- 2.
Where is the current record?
Name the agreed place for the customer, order or project information. A record nobody trusts will always generate a parallel spreadsheet.
- 3.
Who owns the next step?
Make responsibility and the handover clear. A reminder from a helpful colleague should not be the only reason work moves forward.
- 4.
What gets entered twice?
Find repeated entry and reconciliation. Decide what information must travel between systems and what does not need to be collected at all.
- 5.
Where does experience catch the mistake?
Ask what the experienced person checks and why. Some checks need judgment. Others can be prevented by a clear rule, a required field or a consistent calculation.
The purpose is not to remove human judgment. Customers bring exceptions, and experienced people remain valuable. The distinction is between a useful decision and a preventable repair.
Fix one recurring break before adding another system
Imagine a small technical-services company. This is an illustrative situation, not a reported client result. Its project manager spends part of every afternoon asking whether materials have arrived and whether the customer has approved the revised scope. Those answers live in different inboxes.
The first improvement is to agree where the order status lives, who updates it and which missing approval prevents the next step. Only then does it make sense to connect the intake, assign follow-up tasks or add a visible status view. A new project tool without those agreements would simply give the confusion a new address.
Use the same order elsewhere: agree the work, support it digitally, let people use it, then adjust. Start with the break that wastes the most attention or causes the greatest delivery risk. You do not need to rebuild the whole business to stop one repeated failure.
Measure whether the rescue work actually falls
Before changing anything, record a practical starting point over a normal working period: how often information is chased, how long a quotation waits, how many records are entered twice or how often an owner must correct the same issue. These are observations for your business, not industry benchmarks.
After the change, look at the same work again. Can another colleague complete it without the expert standing beside them? Is the current status visible? Has one private list disappeared? Does a completed job reach invoicing without somebody having to remember it?
If the answer is no, the solution is not yet reliable. More notifications or a more attractive screen do not change that. If the answer is yes, skilled people have gained time for customers, quality and decisions that genuinely need their experience.
Good digital work starts with the work people should no longer have to rescue.
Where are your best people still compensating for the process?
If missing information, repeated entry and constant follow-up are part of the working day, start by looking at the way the business runs. Our free Digital Readiness Check is a starting point for that conversation, not a promise that another system will solve everything.
Start your free Digital Readiness CheckSources and editorial references
Editorial starting point: the German LinkedIn post supplied for this article, dated October 13, 2026, opening “Wenn gute Mitarbeitende täglich schlechte Prozesse ausgleichen ...”. The practical questions and illustrative workflow above develop that argument; no survey figures or measured client outcomes are claimed.
This article is our own analysis. The supplied post is credited as the starting point; any third-party rights remain with their owners.
Hasan Hasić
Hasan Hasić is the founder and Business Advisor at wis.dom|bridge™. He helps owners connect business priorities with clearer responsibilities, reliable workflows and practical digital improvements.
