Do you ask your staff to help reduce admin work? 🙏🏻

Every Friday, a manager messages the same three people about timesheets. On Monday, they do it again for the Daily Scrum. Nobody is being difficult, but those reminders add up to hours of management time every month.

The fix is to make the cost visible and escalate in small steps. Ask your team to help reduce admin, and give repeat misses a clear, trackable consequence.

Why do people keep forgetting admin tasks?

Most people miss admin because it isn't top of mind, not out of spite. They rarely see what a miss costs:

• Manager time - Every chase pulls someone away from work that moves the business
• Billing delays - Late timesheets hold up client invoices
• Team visibility - A missing Daily Scrum means nobody knows what you did yesterday

How do you handle a forgotten admin task?

Escalate one step at a time. Only move to the next step when the last one didn't work:

1. Automate the nudge - Use a recurring Teams or Outlook reminder so the message comes from a calendar, not a person
2. Send a friendly reminder on Teams - Fine for the first couple of misses, and it keeps the tone light
3. Send a tagged email if you've had to remind them 3 times in a short space of time - Put (Save me admin 🙏) in the subject, so it can be tracked in Outlook and SSW Eagle Eye for performance reviews

✅ Figure: Good example - A friendly one-off Teams reminder

What should the tagged email look like?

Keep it short and polite:

✅ Figure: Good example - Use an email to remind people of repeatedly forgotten tasks

Learn more

• SSW: Do you remind your team to turn in timesheets?
• SSW: Do you remind your staff to follow the dress code?
• SSW: Do you incentivise your employees to do their timesheets on time?
• SSW: Rules to Better Office Operations