Pay Administrators More, You Jackass

To quote Beyonce, “Who run the world? Administrators.”

Office Managers, Receptionists, Executive Assistants, Ops Coordinators, Legal Assistants. They get shit done, and they do it seamlessly. They know what you’re thinking before you even say it, and believe me when I tell you, they know more about your employees… including you…than anyone else in the company. A good administrator makes everyone look good, and everything look easy while working harder than entire departments.

Most organizations value performance, which seems reasonable until you look at how performance is defined, measured, and rewarded, and realize that what we actually value is not true contribution, but contribution that is easy to see, measure, and is tied to revenue.

Sales is a perfect example of this. A sales role has a number attached to it, and that number provides clarity; it can be tracked, compared, forecast, and celebrated, creating a direct line between effort and outcome that feels objective and defensible, allowing compensation decisions to seem almost self-evident. When someone exceeds their quota, there is very little debate about whether or not they created value, and when they don’t, there is very little ambiguity about that, too.

Now compare that to an Office Manager, or any administrative or operational role integral to an organization’s function, but without a clean output that can be plotted on a graph or added to a dashboard.

The Office Manager doesn’t have a single number that captures their impact, even though their impact is constant, compounding, and deeply felt the moment it’s missing (example, the office manager is out sick, but the coffee machine isn’t working properly so someone texts to let them know, expecting them to miraculously heal themselves and get back to the office in time to get Peter his coffee ask me how I know). They’re often the person managing logistics, information flow, anticipating needs, and absorbing an enormous amount of friction that would otherwise slow everything down. How much is their bonus?

There is no metric for “kept the organization functional under pressure,” or “prevented five small issues from becoming one large, expensive problem,” or “ensured that leaders could focus on decisions instead of other distracting shit.” The absence of a clean metric does not mean the absence of value, but in most organizations, it absolutely means the absence of recognition.

Roles that generate revenue directly become synonymous with impact, while roles enabling that revenue become secondary, regardless of how essential they are to sustaining it. On the surface, especially in environments where growth and profitability are constant pressures, this makes sense, but it begins to fall apart the moment you examine how work actually happens inside a system.

A salesperson does not operate in isolation, even if their performance is often measured that way. Their ability to succeed is shaped by product quality, pricing strategy, brand reputation, internal alignment, operational efficiency, and the basic functioning of the organization around them. When those conditions are strong, sales performance improves; when they’re weak, even the most capable people struggle to maintain results.

The Office Manager, by contrast, is often one of the people responsible for maintaining those conditions, just not in a way that can be easily attributed to a single outcome. But have the wrong person in that role, and everything breaks down. The environment that enabled the salesperson to hit their goal is in distress, and the results are dire not only for the salesperson but also for the organization.

And yet, despite this, we continue to treat admin roles as interchangeable, easily replaceable, and inherently lower value, often defaulting to the assumption that anyone could do it, which is one of the most persistent and costly organizational misconceptions.

Sure, anyone can complete tasks, but very few people can hold a system together in a way that allows it to function smoothly under pressure, and I have yet to see a compensation model account for that.

Part of the reason this persists is that measurement drives behaviour, and when measurement is skewed toward what is easiest to quantify, reward systems follow. Revenue is tangible, immediate, and attributable, so it becomes the primary lens through which value is assessed, while everything that contributes indirectly or systemically becomes harder to justify in the same terms.

I’m not debating whether revenue matters…of course it does. But the argument is really about whether our definition of value is too narrow to capture what actually drives revenue over time.

If you accept that organizations are systems rather than collections of individual outputs, then it becomes clear that performance is not just the result of what individuals produce, but the result of the conditions those individuals are operating within. Stability, trust, coordination, clarity, and the ability to navigate complexity without constant breakdowns are not soft or secondary factors; they are foundational to sustained performance, even if they don’t show up as line items in a report.

This is where leaders, managers, and HR pros have an opportunity, and arguably a responsibility, to intervene more thoughtfully.

We need to expand what counts as contribution, and that requires a very intentional move away from relying solely on easy-to-capture metrics and toward a holistic view of how work actually happens. Managers need to figure out how to surface the work that is currently invisible: what did you do this month that made someone else more effective? What problems did you prevent? What complexity did you successfully navigate so that others could focus on their priorities? Uncover those highest-leverage contributions.

From there, that work needs to be named and documented in a way that connects it to outcomes, even if the connection is indirect. Saying that someone “keeps things running” or “works their magic” is not enough; articulating that they reduced friction across multiple teams, improved response times, or prevented delays that would have impacted delivery translates invisible labour into something that can be understood and valued more concretely.

Compensation philosophy also needs to be reexamined, especially when patterns show that certain types of roles, often administrative, operational, or relational, are consistently underpaid relative to their actual impact. This isn’t just a reflection of market dynamics; it is a reflection of what organizations have historically chosen to prioritize and how those priorities have been codified into pay structures.

I’m not saying we need to pretend that all contributions are identical, but we do require a more accurate alignment between impact and reward that accounts for both direct and enabling forms of value.

A challenge to doing this well, if at all, is that visibility plays a significant role in reinforcing what is perceived as important. When the same roles are consistently associated with success, a feedback loop is created that elevates certain types of contribution while obscuring others. Managers: Deliberately broadening who is seen and who is credited will shift that dynamic over time. That’s on you to role model to your team.

At a more structural level, organizations need to recognize that investing in roles that maintain stability and cohesion is not a cultural nicety but a performance strategy. Teams that are well-supported move faster, make better decisions, and are more resilient under pressure, all of which contribute to stronger outcomes in ways that may not be immediately attributable but are undeniably real.

People in roles that are hard to quantify are almost always underappreciated, undervalued, and underpaid…a recipe for burnout. And when those people leave, organizations tend to realize too late that what they thought was easily replaceable was actually deeply embedded knowledge, judgment, and relational context.

If you want a simple way to assess whether your organization is aligned with what it says it values and what it actually rewards, look at compensation, promotion velocity, and recognition patterns alongside this question: Whose absence would create the most disruption to how work gets done day to day?

My point is not to diminish the importance of revenue-generating roles, but to recognize that revenue does not exist in isolation from the system that produces it, and that system is held together by work that is often invisible, undervalued, and undercompensated. If organizations want sustainable performance, they need to get better at seeing, measuring, and rewarding the full spectrum of contributions.

If you’re not valuing the people who hold your system together, you’re not running a high-performing company, periodt.