Why Your Service Is Inefficient - Even Though Everyone’s Working Hard

You’ve got a good team. People are showing up, staying late, answering emails between meetings, hustling every day.

And yet...The service still feels clunky. Customers still complain.Backlogs grow.

Sound familiar? You’re not alone.

Many leaders find themselves stuck in this frustrating loop: hard-working teams, disappointing results. But here’s the truth: the problem might not be your people - it might be your system.

🔁 When the System Works Against the People

Let’s say your team handles customer requests. They’ve been told to work faster, respond quicker, and reduce call times.

So they do.

But soon, you notice:

• Customers keep calling back to clarify the same things.

• Team members skip steps just to keep up with demand.

• Errors increase, creating more rework down the line.

What’s happening?

The system is optimizing for busyness, not effectiveness.

That’s where systems thinking can help.

⚙️ Flow Efficiency vs. Resource Efficiency

This is a game-changing mindset shift for service leaders.

	Resource Efficiency	Flow Efficiency
Focus	Keeping people busy	Moving the work smoothly
Priority	Maximize individual output	Minimize delays, rework, and handoffs
Outcome	Looks productive, feels slow	Feels calm, delivers faster
Risk	Burnout, silos, inefficiencies	Better teamwork and outcomes

When we focus only on how busy people are, we miss how well the work moves through the system.

🔓 3 Systems Thinking Principles That Unlock Performance when Service Is Inefficient

Let’s break down three core ideas that help you spot and solve service inefficiencies:

1. The System Creates the Performance

If you’ve got good people struggling to succeed, it’s time to look at what the system is making easy - and what it’s making hard.

🔍 Ask:

• Are we incentivizing speed over quality?

• Are we forcing people to work around poor tools or unclear policies?

2. Demand Must Drive Design

Many teams are structured around internal roles or reporting lines - not actual customer demand.

🔍 Ask:

• Do we understand what customers truly need?

• Is our process designed to meet that need end-to-end, or is it chopped up into handoffs?

3. Eliminate the Waste That Feels Like Work

Not all “work” adds value. Some tasks exist just to serve the system (like entering the same info in three places).

🔍 Ask:

• What are we doing that adds no value to the customer?

• What could we simplify, automate, or remove altogether?

🚀 What You Can Try This Week

👉 Pick one service issue that keeps popping up - maybe it’s rework, backlogs, or complaints.👉 Instead of asking who’s responsible, ask what in the system is creating this pattern?

👉 Walk through the process from the customer’s perspective and spot the friction points.

Even a small redesign can unlock major improvements.

💬 Final Thought

Hard work doesn’t equal great service - smart systems do.

When you shift from pushing people harder to designing better systems, you create space for your team to succeed by design, not despite it.

Reflect & Share

Where is your system unintentionally working against your team? What’s one friction point you could redesign to improve flow this week?