Think of the person in your team you would least like to lose. Then think about how they actually spend a normal week.

In most businesses a large part of it is pulling numbers together, chasing people for information, and rebuilding a file that gets rebuilt every month.

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Why it lands on them

Difficult work goes to reliable people. When something matters and it has to be right, it gets given to whoever can be trusted with it.

Over a few years that means the most capable person in the team ends up owning the messiest processes. The month end pack. The buy sheet nobody else understands. The reconciliation between two systems that were never properly connected.

Nobody decided this. It accumulated, one sensible decision at a time, and now it is the shape of their job.

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What it costs when they leave

Good people rarely leave over money. They leave because the work stopped being interesting, and assembly work is not interesting to anyone capable of doing more.

When they go, you find out how much of the process lived in their head. The handover covers the steps and misses the judgement, and the replacement takes a year to reach the same standard.

You then hire for the job as it exists, which means hiring somebody to do assembly, and the cycle continues.

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The week test

This is easy to check. Ask two or three of your best people to write down what they did last week in half day blocks, then mark each block as either judgement or assembly.

Most leaders are surprised by the ratio. It is common to find someone senior spending three days out of five on work that has no decision in it.

Do it with the people you would fight to keep, not with a survey across the company. The answer from four people is enough.

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What to take off them first

Start with whatever is repeated on a fixed cycle and follows rules. The monthly pack. The weekly report. The reconciliation. The data being moved by hand between two tools.

That work automates cleanly and it is usually the largest block on the list. It also produces an immediate and visible result, which matters when you want the team to believe the rest is coming.

Then look at the chasing. A lot of senior time goes into finding out whether something happened and reminding somebody that it needs to. Very little of that requires a person now.

The productivity argument is the obvious one. The retention argument is the expensive one.

If somebody good is spending most of their week on work that does not need them, they already know it. Taking that work away is usually a better use of budget than a counter offer.