sifars-wordpress

Tag: Decision Making

  • The Cost of Invisible Work in Digital Operations

    The Cost of Invisible Work in Digital Operations

    Reading Time: 3 minutes

    Digital work is easily measured by what we see: the dashboards, delivery timelines, automation metrics and system uptime. On paper, everything looks efficient. Yet within many organizations, a great deal of work occurs quietly, continuously and unsung.

    This is all invisible work — and it’s one of the major hidden costs of modern digital operations.

    Invisible work doesn’t factor into KPIs, but it eats time, dampens velocity, and silently caps scale.

    What Is Invisible Work?

    “It’s the work that is necessary to keep things going, that no one sees because systems are either invisible to us or lack of clarity about what we own in a system,” she said.

    It includes activities like:

    • Following up for missing information
    • Clarifying ownership or approvals
    • Reconciling mismatched data across systems
    • Rechecking automated outputs
    • Translating insights into actions manually
    • Collaborate across teams to eliminate ambiguities

    None of that work generates business value.

    But without it, work would grind to a halt.

    Why Invisible Work Is Growing in Our Digital Economy

    In fact, with businesses going digital, invisible work is on the rise.

    Common causes include:

    1. Fragmented Systems

    Data is scattered across tools that don’t talk to each other. Teams waste time trying to stitch context instead of executing.

    1. Automation Without Process Clarity

    “You can automate tasks but not uncertainty. Humans intervene to manage exceptions, edge cases and failures — often manually.

    1. Unclear Decision Ownership

    When no one is clearly responsible for a decision, work comes to a halt as teams wait for validation, sign-offs or alignment.

    1. Over-Coordination

    More tools and teams yields more handoffs, meetings, and status updates to “stay aligned.”

    Digital tools make tasks faster — but bad system design raises the cost of coordination.

    The Hidden Business Cost

    Invisible work seldom rings alarms, yet it strikes with a sting.

    Slower Execution

    Work moves, but progress doesn’t. Projects languish among teams rather than within them.

    Reduced Capacity

    Top-performing #teams take time maintaining flow versus producing results.

    Increased Burnout

    People tire from constant context-switching and follow-ups, even if workloads seem manageable.

    False Signals of Productivity

    The activity level goes up — the meetings and messages, updates — but momentum goes down.

    The place appears busy, but feels sluggish.

    Why the Metrics Don’t Reflect the Problem

    Many operational metrics concentrate on the outputs.

    • Tasks completed
    • SLAs met
    • Automation coverage
    • System uptime

    It is in this space between measures that invisible work resides.

    You won’t find metrics for:

    • Time spent chasing clarity
    • Energy lost in coordination
    • Decisions delayed by ambiguity

    By the point that such performances decline, the harm has already been done.

    Invisible Work and Scale: The 2x+ Value Chain

    As organizations grow:

    • Other teams interact with the same workflows
    • Yet we continue to introduce more approvals “in order to be safe”
    • More tools enter the stack

    Each addition creates small frictions. Individually, they seem harmless. Collectively, they slow everything down.

    Growth balloons invisible work unless systems are purposefully redesigned.

    What High-Performing Organizations Do Differently

    Institutions that do away with invisible work think not in terms of individual elbow grease but of system design.

    They:

    • And make ownership clear at every decision milestone.
    • Plan your workflow based on results, not work.
    • Reduce handoffs before adding automation
    • Integrate data into decision-making moments
    • Measure flow, not just activity

    Clear systems naturally eliminate invisible work.

    Technology Doesn’t Kill Middle-Class Jobs, Public Policy Does

    Further) we keep adding tools, without fixing the structure, that often just add more invisible work.

    True efficiency comes from:

    • Clear decision rights
    • Nice bit of context provided at the right moment
    • Fewer approvals, not faster ones
    • Action-guiding systems, not merely status-reporting ones

    Digital maturity isn’t that you have to do everything, it’s that less has to be compensatory.

    Final Thought

    Invisible work is a toll on digital processes.

    It does take time, it takes resources and talent — never to be reflected on a scorecard.

    It’s not that people aren’t working hard, causing organizations to experience a loss in productivity.

    They fail because human glue holds systems together.

    The true opportunity is not to optimize effort.

    It is to design work in which hidden labor is no longer required.

    If your teams appear to be constantly busy yet execution feels slow, invisible work could be sapping your operations.

    Sifars enables enterprises to identify latent friction in digital workflows and re-assess the systems by which effort translates into impetus.

    👉 Reach out to us if you want learn more about where invisible work is holding your business back – and how to free it.

  • Measuring People Is Easy. Designing Work Is Hard.

    Measuring People Is Easy. Designing Work Is Hard.

    Reading Time: 4 minutes

    Most organizations are fantastic at measuring people. They define metrics, create dashboards, schedule reviews and doggedly track targets. Labour time, outcomes, utilisation rates and KPIs may all represent productivity. As an outsider looking in, it seems like performance is a tightly-scripted process.

    However in spite of all this measurement, many organisations wrestle with the same enduring issues: work feels transacted not deep; teams are ripped, outcomes fall shy and high performers burn out. That raises an uncomfortable question: if you’re so good at measuring, why does productivity still fail?

    The answer is simple, if not easy: it’s far easier to measure people than to design work.

    The Comfort of Measurement

    Measurement feels reassuring. Numbers give the illusion of control. When leaderships can look at charts, scores and ranks then there is this air of objectivity to how performance are being managed.

    Most organisations invest heavily in:

    • Individual performance metrics
    • Time and activity tracking
    • Output-based targets
    • Review and appraisal frameworks

    These are well-known systems, scalable and easy to standardise. They also shift responsibility downward. When things don’t work out, the temptation is to assume that the problem is one of effort rather than that of how work itself is organized.

    Why Measurement Rarely Fixes Productivity

    The issue with measurement is that it’s not bad but it’s insufficient. Deciding what to do with them doesn’t magically make work flow better through an organisation.

    People who never work on bad design suffer too. Responsibilities are fragmented, dependencies are muddy, priorities change frequently and decisions lag. There, quantity often serves as a catalyst of symptoms rather than causes.

    People are rated, coached and pushed harder, yet the underlying friction that was holding you back is allowed to fester.

    Work Design: The Secret to Productivity

    Designing work is deciding how jobs are arranged, how tasks are allotted and how decisions course through the organisation. “An ideology of effort dispensates or multiplies,” he said.

    Badly performed work often rears its ugly head as:

    • Constant context switching
    • Excessive coordination and handoffs
    • Unclear ownership and accountability
    • Work pending approvals and no Progress.

    None of these problems is addressed by better measurement. They require intentional design.

    Why It’s So Much Easier to Make Decisions About Someone Else’s Work

    Unlike measurement, work design makes organisations uncomfortable in the face of inconvenient truths. It forces leaders to question structures, practices and decision rights that have been part of the company for years.

    The design of work at its best raises other questions that are harder to answer:

    • Who truly owns this outcome?
    • Where’s work slowing? And why?
    • Which ones are adding value, and which are just there because of repetition?
    • Which decisions should get made closer to the execution?

    These three questions challenge hierarchy, routine and control. As a result, many organizations tend to measure the people instead.

    When Measurement Becomes a Distraction

    Over-measurement can actively harm productivity. When people are judged based on narrow measures like these, they will optimize for the metric and not for the goal we actually want to accomplish. Partnerships are hurt, risks are shunned, and short-term results trump long term value.

    Work in those places… work becomes performance. The activity picks up, but the influence does not. Teams cross fingers to prove they are productive, instead of simply being productive.

    Measurement is then distracting from the real work of improvement.

    The Human Toll of Poor Work Design

    When work is poorly designed, people absorb the waste. They work late, patch over gaps and bend around broken processes. Initially, this looks like commitment. It eventually demoralizes and alienates people.

    It is the high performers who start feeling this pressure first. They are given more work, with more complexity and more ambiguity. Eventually, they crash or break down or leave — not because they cannot handle the job but because it’s impossible to keep at that pace.

    Moving Its Gaze from People to Work

    Productivity increasing organizations are those that stop looking at individuals and start focusing on a better system of work.

    This means paying attention to:

    • How work flows across teams
    • Where decisions get delayed
    • How priorities get made (and remade)

    Whether the functions are such that roles can be designated or muddied

    Good design naturally leads to better performance. This creates a mentality where measurement is supportive, not punitive.

    A Model of Better Work Design

    Good work Places have some things in common.

    • Clear ownership of outcomes
    • Fewer handoffs and dependencies
    • Decision-making authority aligned with responsibility
    • Procedures that create, rather than minimize friction

    People are not needed to keep an eye on such systems. Productivity does not manifest in hours, productivity shows up in results.

    How Sifars Approaches Productivity Differently

    We believe at Sifars that problems of productivity are rarely problems with people. They are design problems. 

    Shaping work: an examination of the ways in which we divide up and structure work, make decisions and design systems that do – or don’t – support performance.

    We’re dedicated to helping leaders go beyond just measurement to intentional work design that drives clarity, pace and sustainability.

    Conclusion

    It will always be easier to measure people than it is to design work. It’s quicker, it memorizes and it disrupts less. But it is also less powerful.

    After all, real productivity gains accrue from deliberately shaping environments in which it’s easy to do good work and hard to do bad work.

    Work designIf organisations can get the work design right, then individuals don’t have to be pushed.

    They perform.

    If your company monitors performance closely but still finds productivity lagging, the problem may not be effort — it may be how work is constructed.

    Sifars enables organisations to reimagine the design of work, flow of decisions, and execution models so that effort translates into real impact.

    👉 Chat to us about how stronger work design can reboot sustainable performance.

  • Why Leadership Dashboards Don’t Drive Better Decisions

    Why Leadership Dashboards Don’t Drive Better Decisions

    Reading Time: 3 minutes

    There are leadership dashboards all over the place. Executives use dashboards to keep an eye on performance, risks, growth measures, and operational health in places like boardrooms and quarterly reviews. These tools claim to make things clear, keep everyone on the same page, and help you make decisions based on evidence.

    Even if there are a lot of dashboards, many businesses still have trouble with sluggish decisions, priorities that don’t match, and executives that react instead of planning.

    The problem isn’t that there isn’t enough data. The thing is that dashboards don’t really affect how decisions are made.

    Seeing something doesn’t mean you understand it.

    Dashboards are great for illustrating what happened. Trends in revenue, usage rates, customer attrition, and headcount growth are all clearly shown. But just being able to see something doesn’t mean you understand it.

    Leaders don’t usually make decisions based on just one metric. They have to do with timing, ownership, trade-offs, and effects. Dashboards show numbers, but they don’t necessarily explain how they are related or what would happen if you act—or don’t act—on those signals.

    Because of this, leaders look at the data but still use their gut, experience, or stories they’ve heard to decide what to do next.

    Too much information and not enough direction

    Many modern dashboards have too many metrics. Each function wants its KPIs shown, which leads to displays full of charts, filters, and trend lines.

    Dashboards don’t always make decisions easier; they can make things worse. Instead of dealing with the real problem, leaders spend time arguing about which metric is most important. Instead of making decisions, meetings become places where people talk about data.

    When everything seems significant, nothing seems urgent.

    Dashboards Aren’t Connected to Real Workflows

    One of the worst things about leadership dashboards is that they don’t fit into the way work is done.

    Every week or month, we look over the dashboards.

    Every day, people make choices.

    Execution happens all the time.

    By the time insights get to the top, teams on the ground have already made tactical decisions. The dashboard is no longer a way to steer; it’s a way to look back.

    Dashboards give executives information, but they don’t change the results until they are built into planning, approval, and execution systems.

    At the executive level, context is lost.

    By themselves, numbers don’t always tell the whole story. A decline in production could be due to process bottlenecks, unclear ownership, or deadlines that are too tight. A sudden rise in income could hide rising operational risk or employee weariness.

    Dashboards take away subtleties in order to make things easier. This makes data easier to read, but it also takes away the context that leaders need to make smart choices.

    This gap often leads to efforts that only tackle the symptoms and not the core causes.

    Not just metrics, but also accountability are needed for decisions.

    Dashboards tell you “what is happening,” but they don’t often tell you “who owns this?”

    What choice needs to be made?

    What will happen if we wait?

    Without defined lines of responsibility, insights move between teams. Everyone knows there is a problem, yet no one does anything about it. Leaders think that teams will respond, and teams think that leaders will put things first.

    The end outcome is decision paralysis that looks like alignment.

    What Really Makes Leadership Decisions Better

    Systems that are built around decision flow, not data display, help people make better choices.

    Systems that work for leaders:

    Get insights to the surface when a decision needs to be made.

    Give background information, effects, and suggested actions

    Make it clear who is responsible and how to go up the chain of command.

    Make sure that strategy is directly linked to execution.

    Dashboards change from static reports to dynamic decision-making aids in these kinds of settings.

    From Reporting to Making Decisions

    Organizations that do well are moving away from dashboards as the main source of leadership intelligence. Instead, they focus on enabling decisions by putting insights into budgeting, hiring, product planning, and risk management processes.

    Data doesn’t simply help leaders here. It helps people take action, shows them the repercussions of their choices, and speeds up the process of getting everyone on the same page.

    Conclusion

    Leadership dashboards don’t fail because they don’t have enough data or are too complicated.

    They fail because dashboards don’t make decisions.

    Dashboards will only be able to generate improved outcomes if insights are built into how work is planned, approved, and done.

    More charts aren’t the answer to the future of leadership intelligence.

    Leaders can make decisions faster, act intelligently, and carry out their plans with confidence because of systems.

    Connect with Sifars today to schedule a consultation 

    www.sifars.com