What Support Teams Actually Do in Professional Services

The real job of support teams is to protect the scarcest resource in professional services: professional attention and time.

In 2020, a number of professionals at our firm billed more than 100 hours in a single week. Another large group hit 90 hours at least once. Factor in eating, hygiene, sleep, and overhead time, and 100 billable hours requires about 95% of a week’s 168 hours devoted to work and survival.

On top of that, professionals are often expected to mentor others, manage a practice, attend industry events, write papers, and handle many other time-consuming but non-billable activities.

Doctors, investment bankers, and lawyers may work even longer hours. The demands differ, but all depend on limited professional time.

The Real Job

The job of the professional services firm’s support team is to minimize the overhead time of the firm’s chargeable professionals.

A lawyer, consultant, doctor, or engineer may face a 100-hour week with little warning. Urgent client needs and deadlines make the work unpredictable.

Minutes spent waiting to work because of a system failure, process inefficiency, or human error rarely cost the firm money directly. Professional pride and longstanding personal relationships with clients compel our teams into even longer hours to deliver in spite of obstacles. The client gets served. The deadline gets met. The problem appears to be solved.

The lost time comes out of the professional’s life outside work.

Avoidable Overhead

A partial list of avoidable overhead:

Forms that ask questions we already know the answers to. Every field on a form should justify its existence. If we can get the answer from our systems, we should. If we can infer it from context, we should. If we asked before and nothing has changed, we shouldn’t ask again. Forms that interrogate professionals for information we already have are disrespectful of their time.

Processes that require company-specific knowledge rather than a guided path. When a process demands that someone memorize how things work here, we’ve created a tax on new hires and occasional users alike. A process that merely requires following a clear and linear path is a process that respects people’s cognitive load. The overhead of learning our peculiar ways should be borne by the system design, not by the professionals using it.

Support interactions that require more participation than necessary. “Your call is important to us.” Is it? Then solve the problem without requiring me to explain it three times to three different people. Every minute a professional spends on hold, re-explaining context, or navigating a phone tree is a minute they’re not billing or recovering.

Approval workflows that assume bad intent. Some controls are necessary, but many serve no practical purpose. Approval chains for events that have never occurred and likely never will add work to every transaction to protect against nonexistent risk. Compare the cost of each control with the cost of the error it prevents.

Documentation that requires hunting. If someone needs a policy, a template, or a procedure, how long does it take to find it? Five seconds is reasonable. Five minutes is a failure. The architecture of our information systems either respects professional time or it doesn’t.

The Economics of Overhead

Labor is the commodity we sell. There is a fixed supply of it.

We cannot create more hours or hire fast enough to relieve the shortage. The hours available to our professionals limit what we can sell.

An hour spent on overhead is unavailable for billing or rest. The firm loses potential revenue, and the professional loses recovery time.

A five-minute inefficiency occurring twice daily costs about 40 hours per year. Across 50 professionals, that is 2,000 hours annually, with consequences for revenue and burnout.

Retention and Work/Life Balance

Our professionals can always find somewhere else to work.

The labor market for skilled professionals is competitive, and the best have options. If we burden them with wasteful overhead, the cost will become apparent when they leave for a firm that respects their free time.

Work/life balance includes both time outside work and the division of working hours between client work and firm-imposed overhead. Support teams control the overhead.

We cannot reduce client demands and often cannot reduce billable hours without losing revenue. We can minimize overhead, making more time available for billing or life outside work.

Measuring Time Lost to Overhead

Support teams track uptime, ticket closure rates, and satisfaction scores. These measures do not fully account for professionals’ time lost to overhead.

We need to measure how much of that time we waste.

Small, dispersed inefficiencies make wasted time difficult to measure. Professionals still notice the repeated delays and unnecessary work.

Running systems, closing tickets, and meeting service-level agreements should recover professional time.

Fix the problems that waste the most time first. Design systems for busy professionals whose time is scarce. Build processes that guide them through the work without interrogating them. Every minute of overhead imposes a cost on someone short of time. Firms that recognize this build support teams that enable the business; those that do not build teams that quietly undermine it.