The Admin Hours Sitting Inside a Licensed Trade: How to Find Them Before You Hire

A site supervisor starts at 6:30. By 8:15 he has chased two purchase orders, rebooked a plumbing inspection that was cancelled at the council end, forwarded a plan revision to three subcontractors, and taken a call about a delivery that will now arrive Thursday.

Every one of those tasks had to be done by someone that morning, and none of them called on his licence, his ticket or his twenty years on tools. He was the person standing there.

This is the version of the labour shortage that gets less attention than the recruitment numbers. Australian construction employed around 1.37 million people in February 2026, and close to 20,000 construction positions were still unfilled by May. The Housing Industry Association’s June quarter Trades Report put its availability index at -0.59, found every trade and every market in shortage, and estimated a need for 83,000 additional skilled tradespeople. Alongside those figures sits a quieter one that no report measures: the hours already inside the business that are being spent on work the licence does not require.

Start with a two-week log

Guessing at this produces bad decisions. Every owner has a theory about where their supervisors’ time goes, and the theory is usually wrong in one specific direction: it underestimates the small interruptions and overestimates the big blocks.

The method is simple and slightly tedious. Pick two supervisors or leading hands. For ten working days, they log what they did in thirty minute blocks. A note on a phone, filled in three or four times a day, kept well away from payroll.

Two weeks is the right length. One week gets distorted by whatever went wrong that week. A month never gets finished.

Then sort every block into three columns:

Requires this person. Supervision, safety calls, quality checks, licensed work, client conversations that need authority, anything requiring physical presence on site.

Requires someone in the business. Real work that has to happen, done by someone with context, without needing a licence or a site presence.

Requires nobody. Duplicated reporting, forms nobody reads, status updates that exist because a process was never retired.

The third column is usually smaller than people expect and worth removing on the spot. The second column is the one that answers the hiring question, and it is the only column that should influence a decision about headcount.

What the second column usually holds

Across residential and small commercial builders, the same items appear:

• Chasing purchase orders and confirming delivery dates with suppliers
• Booking, confirming and rebooking inspections, and updating the site programme when they move
• Distributing plan revisions and confirming each subcontractor has the current set
• Collecting subcontractor insurance certificates, licences and induction paperwork before they can start
• Chasing timesheets and dockets at the end of each week
• Filling in warranty registration forms and manufacturer paperwork after installation
• Building the job file: naming and filing site photographs, logging variations, recording dated notes
• Following up quotes from subcontractors and comparing them into a usable format
• Answering the same three client questions about progress, timing and next steps

What the total comes to is the whole point of the exercise, and it is usually larger than the owner expected. In most businesses the same work, gathered into one place, would occupy someone for the better part of a week. Spread across three supervisors it looks like nothing, and all three of them are in short supply.

What the log tends to reveal

Two things surprise people when the fortnight is up.

The first is the shape of the time. The admin arrives as eleven separate interruptions between 6:30 and 8:15, each one short enough to feel trivial and each one landing in the middle of something else. That is why the theory is usually wrong: the supervisor remembers the morning as being on site, because most of it was.

The second is how much of it arrives from outside. Suppliers ring the supervisor. Certifiers ring the supervisor. Subcontractors ring the supervisor because that is the number they have. A significant share of the load is inbound and gets handled on the spot, which means it never looks like a task and never gets counted.

Both findings point the same way. Work distributed in fragments across three site-based people looks like nothing on any given day and adds to a role by the end of the month.

The work that stays

The audit is only useful if it is honest about the other direction.

Anything requiring a licence stays with the licence holder, and that includes signing off on work, certifying compliance and lodging in a licence holder’s name. Safety decisions stay on site, made by someone who can see the conditions. Quality checks stay with someone physically present. Client conversations that commit the business to a price, a date or a position stay with the person who has authority to commit.

Judgment about sequencing stays close to the site as well. Someone remote can update the programme, chase the trades and confirm the bookings. Deciding that the tiler moves before the electrician because of what happened in the wet weather on Tuesday requires being there.

Setting this out before hiring heads off scope drift, where a role gradually absorbs work that quietly needs site presence and then produces a mistake everyone remembers.

Freed hours refill unless the task moves

The part that gets skipped is what happens after the audit.

Hours that are freed without the underlying task being formally reassigned do not stay free. The purchase order chasing comes back within a fortnight, because the supplier rings the supervisor directly and the supervisor answers, because he always has.

Moving the task properly means three things. The supplier, the council and the subcontractors get told who to contact. The supervisor’s phone stops being the default route, which requires the supervisor to actually redirect the calls for the first month rather than handling them because it is quicker. And the person receiving the work gets the context that makes their answers correct: which suppliers are on account, which inspections need the certifier called first, which subcontractors need three days’ notice.

That third item is documentation, and it is the reason handovers fail more often than they fail on capability.

Where this lands

The audit produces a list. The list is either a role or it is not.

Under about eight hours a week, redistributing internally usually costs less than a hire. Above fifteen hours a week of consistent, repeating work, it is a role, and splitting it across people who each have another job means it stays fragmented.

HIPPO runs this conversation with Australian construction and trades businesses before recruiting for anything. The work gets mapped and documented while recruitment is running, so the person arrives with the context rather than collecting it over six months. If you have a rough sense of where your supervisors’ hours are going and want to test it, run the two-week log first. Bring the result to a Connect session and there is something concrete to work from. Book a Connect Session