Stop Calling It Admin

There's a type of work that every single person does, regardless of job title, industry, or whether they're even in “work” at all.

Managing life. Meal planning. Organising a holiday. Keeping track of which school forms need signing, which contractor still hasn't replied, which person needs chasing about summer plans.

And then at work: chasing confirmations, writing follow ups, documenting decisions so they don't get made twice, differently (Nooooo!). Connecting threads across teams who've never actually spoken to each other.

It's all the same category of work. And almost everywhere - at home, in a team, at the C-suite - it carries the same label in people’s head: Admin.

Which is such a shame. Admin, as a concept, implies something low-stakes and interchangeable. Something that anyone could do, given a spare afternoon and a working knowledge of spreadsheets. It implies you're just keeping the wheels turning - not that you are the wheels, the engine, the gear stick.

As I see it, when work gets that label, it gets treated accordingly. It gets pushed to the bottom of the priority list, deprioritised in favour of things that sound more important, handed off to whoever has capacity rather than whoever has the context. The thing is, the work still needs doing and is the basis of so much else - it just stops getting the time, the attention, or the credit it requires.

"Admin" usually isn't

When nobody can remember whether the school event was today or next Tuesday, because nothing was ever written down. Admin? No. Knowledge management. And when it breaks down, everyone feels it.

When a decision is made that impacts the roadmap, no one writes it down, maybe there isn't anywhere to write it down, and someone has to piece it back together when asked - that's 1) fairly annoying but 2) a gap in institutional memory.

When a project stalls because two teams are working off different versions of the same brief, someone has to find that out, fix it, and make sure it doesn't happen again. Risk mitigation.

When a new stakeholder joins mid-process and needs bringing up to speed without derailing the timeline, someone has to make that happen. Change management.

The point is this: the label changes. The work doesn't.

Why does it keeps getting mislabelled?

Part of it is structural. Nobody notices the well-maintained tracker, or the person who caught the misalignment before it became a crisis. The value of this work is often most legible in its absence - when things fall apart, when someone get’s stuck because they don’t know the profile of a project, everyone suddenly understands what was holding them together.

Part of it is cultural. There's a persistent hierarchy in how we talk about work: strategy sits at the top, execution in the middle, and anything that looks like coordination, status updates or documentation gets filed at the bottom. Even when that work is the thing enabling the whole car to function.

And a big part of it, honestly, is that the people doing the work sometimes internalise the framing themselves.

Language shapes perception

When you stop calling it admin and start calling it what it is - workflow design, cross-functional alignment, process governance, knowledge management - something will shift in the quality and frequency with which you do it. The output doesn't change necessarily, but the frame and value you attach to it does.

For instance, the tracker you update is invaluable. It's a single source of truth that impacts hundreds, maybe thousands of colleagues and customers. The meetings you facilitate aren't catch-ups. They're decision forums. The documentation you write isn't delicious cream filing. It's the organisational memory that your team will rely on tomorrow and in six months' time.

The meeting that exists because the process doesn't

Here's a reliable sign that operational work isn't being done - or isn't being followed: the status update meeting for the groundwork you do.

We've all been there, right? Fifteen minutes on the calendar that stretches to forty-five. Everyone reporting on what they've done since last time. Information that, in theory, already lives somewhere (maybe several places) but in practice, nobody's looking at it outside the meeting. The meeting becomes the system. GUYS, THAT'S NOT A SYSTEM. 

It's too easy to diagnose this as a culture problem. People just need to update the thing, right? But it's rarely that simple. Sometimes the process exists and adoption hasn't landed. Sometimes the process and structure doesn’t exist. This means change management at the ground level.

When a system does eventually bed in, those meetings evolve. A thirty-minute catch-up becomes a five-minute exception-only check-in, and anyone can check in at any given moment to understand where things are. Or you have enough time to bond with your colleagues in the first few minutes. Or raise that issue there’s no other forum to talk about There’s your return on all that invisible investment. 

Curveball: some of it really is busywork

Discernment matters here. Not everything that gets called admin is mislabelled ops work. Some of it genuinely is friction - tasks that exist because no one has paused to ask whether they should. Needing to update several things manually about the same thing because it's the only way you have to keep everyone aligned, for instance.

It's important to distinguish between them. Defending operational work doesn't mean defending every process uncritically. A report nobody reads. A meeting that could be an update. A sign-off chain that predates the current team structure. That all is worth naming too - and eliminating it is itself an act of good ops thinking.

A useful test: what would happen if this task simply stopped? If the answer is "nothing" - a candidate for cutting - ask around. If the answer involves a gap that would materialise over the next few weeks - the work worth protecting and potentially optimising.

So here's what I'm saying

The work most people wave away as admin is often more valuable than the label suggests - and more costly when it's absent than anyone realises until it's gone. However, value isn't automatic. It's worth asking honestly whether something is holding things together or just adding to the pile.

If you find yourself doing something because something's broken upstream, that's a signal worth acting on - who can you bring in to fix the root cause rather than just managing the symptoms whilst cursing under your breath?

Finally, I can't stress this enough, you don't need "Operations" in your title for any of this to resonate. Everyone operates within flows, rhythms and outcomes. The question is whether you're naming that effort clearly enough to give it the attention, and the credit, it deserves?