In the wake of recent offshoring news, this one hit me between the eyes!
City AM recently published a series of three articles about “shadow work”. All great articles, but they stopped just short of saying what needed to be said.
Shadow work is defined as the manual, repetitive, unofficial work that sits outside formal roles but still has to be done for organisations to function. The chasing. The re-entering of data. The coordination. The fixing of broken processes. The work that fractures focus and leads to burnout.
City A.M. cites research estimating this costs businesses around $1.7 trillion globally each year.
But here is the part they missed.
Shadow work is not new.
And it already had a home.
As organisations reduced or removed administrative roles, the work did not disappear. It moved upwards.
Executives began managing their own calendars, travel, expenses, approvals, documents, and systems work. Work that requires continuity, context, and flow was pushed onto the most expensive roles in the business.
That is where the real cost shows up.
Cutting assistants to save money only works if you believe executive time has no value.
An executive on £200k who saves 25 percent of their time through effective administrative support is reclaiming the equivalent of £50k a year in executive capacity.
And that is before you count:
• what they do in that saved time that creates revenue
• increased strategic thinking time
• faster decision-making
• increased attention
• lower risk of burnout
But what of AI? Isn’t that doing these tasks instead and for much less cost?
The thing is that automation layered onto the wrong roles does not create productivity. It creates noise. Technology cannot compensate for misallocated work.
Assistants were never just “doing admin”. They were managing flow, protecting time, connecting systems, and absorbing problems so leaders could lead.
So yes, “shadow work” is costing businesses a fortune.
But only because assistants have been stripped back, removed, or stretched to the limit.
If assistants are reading this and thinking, “this explains my life”, your instinct is right.
And if leaders are serious about productivity, the answer is not another platform.
It is putting the work back where it belongs, and letting them use technology to amplify capability, not replace it.
