We are recruiting skilled workers for tasks we could have eliminated long ago.
The debate about skills shortages focuses almost entirely on recruitment: advertisements, salaries, employer branding, training and immigration. All correct, necessary and well documented. [Evidence: current skilled-labour shortage index or SECO labour-market data]
The other half of the answer receives much less attention. When people are scarce, what matters is not only how many the company finds, but how much of their time genuinely creates value and how much is lost to searching, waiting, duplicate entry, setup processes, rework and unplanned journeys.
In many companies, a double-digit percentage of working time is lost this way. That is not employee negligence but the result of processes and tools that evolved separately and were never considered together. Each friction point is too small to fix on its own. Together, they amount to a position the company would not need to fill.
Modern equipment, digital scheduling, properly equipped vehicles and ergonomic tools therefore work twice. They increase output per employee without requiring anyone to work faster, an important distinction often lost in the productivity debate. And they change how the workplace feels.
That creates an uncomfortable budget issue: investment in tools is investment in employer quality. We simply do not account for it that way. It therefore competes with other capital expenditure rather than with the cost of an unfilled position. That cost is substantial: overtime, declined orders, pressure on the existing team and months of recruitment effort.
Combining the two calculations produces different decisions. Financing also helps: a monthly instalment can be compared directly with the capacity gained. A one-off investment, by contrast, enters a budget pot where it loses against everything else.
An installation company leases modern vehicles and digital scheduling tools so its technicians spend less time in the office and more time with customers.
How many hours a week does your best team lose to avoidable friction, and what would one fewer position be worth?