How to Ease Your Admin Burden: Top Tips and Life Hacks

From tax returns to form-filling, there’s always a mountain of mundane tasks getting in the way of more productive work. These strategies should help you keep on top of it all

They have used big buck advertising campaigns featuring ducks, meditating builders and behavioural insights to try to persuade us all that “tax doesn’t have to be taxing”.

But the helpful people at Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs know that, well, actually it kind of is. After all, tax is one of the unavoidable elements of business admin, which is why HMRC wants to make tax simpler and less admin-heavy – including by making the whole process digital.

Yet it remains a drain on resources for many businesses. For a small or medium-sized company, Plum Consulting reckons, business-related admin takes up 5% of annual staff time. Consultancy McKinsey estimates that chief executives spend about 25% of their working hours on administrative tasks that could probably be automated too.

In fact, form-filling is so pervasive in certain professions such as policing, nursing and the public sector, that people are taking “holiday” in order to finish it – researchers from the University of Manchester have even coined the depressing term “leavism” to describe this. “Everybody thinks police complain about the dangers of the job, but the thing they complain about more is the paperwork,” says Sir Cary Cooper, professor of organisational psychology and health at Manchester Business School, who researched this trend alongside Dr Ian Hesketh.

But if admin feels like a slow and suffocating killer of energy, creativity and time, what are the life hacks that can help you deal with it – without having to use your precious holiday time?

Removing the pain altogether is an option favoured by Cooper. “Some people find ways to bypass it – for example, picking up the phone and talking to a human being to see if there’s any shortcut to spending their time filling in 12 pages of forms,” he says. “One of the things people absolutely hate is tax, so you should go to a bookkeeper or someone who can do this for you. You outsource some of the tasks, and if you can afford it financially, it will relieve you psychologically.”

Automation and technology could also alleviate some of your admin woes. Business software company SAP predicts that intelligent technology will soon take over routine tasks such as logging time or benchmarking budgets. The company already has a software solution called SAP Concur that can automate expenses, invoices and the reclaiming of VAT – removing the most menial tasks such as data capture and re-entry, and using machine learning to accurately populate expense and invoice reports.

Systems such as these for speeding up back-office processes can leave employees free to enjoy their jobs more and perform better.

Simple technological choices are already saving admin time at the Innocent drinkscompany, according to its culture and environment leader, David McKay. For instance, the company prioritises instant messaging over detailed presentations. “It’s a case of stepping back and understanding the nature of your work and how and what you’re communicating,” says McKay. “Going back a few years we would send an email, it goes into a queue and it takes a day or two for a reply. Instant messages seem to cut through all that and you do get answers much quicker.

“In all our offices we have one central hub to build community across the business and enable people to have face-to-face conversations. And if we put a ban on PowerPoint, we could have a meeting which conveyed exactly the same amount of information in a much shorter period of time.”

Some small businesses find ways to scrap certain administrative tasks altogether – for instance, by ditching holiday limits just as Netflix and Virgin Management have done. Jenny Biggam, co-founder of The7Stars, an agency that buys media space and measures advertising campaigns, says that from the start they worked out what processes they could do without, such as job titles and HR processes. “One of our company values is ‘people above process’, which is about how if you give people more freedom and autonomy, and remove some of the unnecessary process around them, they will flourish and perform better for the business,” she says. “Some of the things we have eliminated from our business completely are the need to count how much time you take off on holiday. We don’t keep formal appraisal records of our team or people’s individual objectives. All of that goes on in a fluid way between people and their bosses – but they don’t fill in a form about each other.”

Writing a clear brief for a creative team is valuable for the business, she adds, while, on the other hand, some time-consuming HR processes might not be.

Little and often is another maxim. Cooper recommends an hour a week, perhaps at 9am on a Friday, for all the necessary admin. Meanwhile, productivity guru David Allen famously suggested the “two-minute rule” in his book Getting Things Done: basically, if a given admin task takes two minutes or less to complete, you should do it immediately rather than let it pile up.

But, of course, when it comes to some tasks, you don’t even need to spend two minutes on them now that you can automate them altogether.

SAP Concur provides intelligent solutions to help your business automate admin tasks such as expenses and invoices – giving you and your business the time and energy to focus on growing, innovating and making fruitful connections. To find out more about how SAP Concur can help you combine efficiency with intelligence, go to concur.co.uk