Questions we answer Capacity and workload

My best people are doing low-value work

Expensive people doing cheap work is a real and quantifiable loss. The fix is usually to move or remove the work, not to hire someone junior to absorb it.

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The short answer

This is a genuine and measurable problem, and the usual fix is not to hire someone to absorb the work. Establish first what the low-value work actually is: if it is administration around the real work, much of it can be removed or automated; if it exists because a process makes it necessary, change the process; if it is genuinely necessary and genuinely someone else's job, move it. Hiring a junior to take it on works only where there is enough of it to be a coherent role and someone has time to supervise.

Senior people doing junior work is one of the few team problems with an obvious cost attached, which makes it satisfying to spot and easy to mis-solve.

The instinct is to add a cheaper person underneath. Sometimes that is right. More often the low-value work is not a job — it is a residue of how things are set up, and giving it to someone permanently just makes the residue permanent too.

Is it really this?

Worth checking before you spend anything. These are the signals that tend to tell the two apart.

Signs it is

You can name specific tasks and roughly how many hours a week they take.
The tasks need little judgement and are largely the same each time.
The people doing them would be doing something demonstrably more valuable otherwise.

Signs it's something else

The "low-value" work turns out to need context only senior people have.
It is scattered across many people in small amounts rather than concentrated.
The real issue is that the valuable work is not defined, so everything looks equally urgent.

What's usually behind it

Administration that grew around the real work and was never designed.
Tools that do not talk to each other, so a person is the integration.
Seniority accumulating tasks because they are trusted to get them right.

What people usually get wrong

Hiring a junior into a collection of unrelated tasks, and creating a role nobody can grow in.
Automating the administration and leaving the process that generates it.
Assuming that because a task is dull it must be low-value.

The options, and when each one fits

In no particular order. Which of these fits depends on your situation, not on the question you typed.

Remove the work
It exists because of how something else is set up, not because anyone needs it.
Automate it
The steps repeat, are written down, and come round often enough to pay back.
Move it to someone else
It is genuinely necessary and genuinely belongs elsewhere.
Hire for it
There is enough coherent work for a real role and someone to supervise it.

When doing nothing is the right call

Spend a week having the people concerned write down what they actually did, hour by hour. It is rarely what anyone expected, and it turns this from a frustration into a decision with numbers attached.

What the diagnostic asks

What kind of pressure this is and how long it has been there.
Whether the work is mostly repeatable or different each time.
How much of it is written down.
How often it comes round, and how much judgement it needs.

“I don't know” is always an answer. Nothing is assumed on your behalf.

The routes it weighs

Every diagnostic weighs all ten routes. These are the ones that tend to matter for this question — a description of the rules, not a promise about your answer.

Redistribute
Move ownership of the work to where it fits, and make that explicit.
Process improvement
Change how the work flows — remove steps, name an owner, fix the hand-offs.
AI Assist
Keep a person in charge and give them AI for drafting, summarising, checking or analysis.
AI Agent
Delegate a defined, repeatable workflow to software inside boundaries you set, with human oversight.
Recruit
Recruit a new person for a durable, sizeable need that is central to the team.
Develop
Build the capability in someone already in the team, with time and support.

What changes the answer

Repeatable, documented, frequent work is a strong automation candidate.
Work that needs context and judgement is not low-value, whoever is doing it.
Enough coherent low-value work to fill a role changes the question into a hiring one.

Get your own read

A handful of short questions, then the strongest route for your situation, what's also credible, what we still don't know and what would change our view. No account, no setup.