If you lead a small nonprofit or small organisation, this may sound familiar: deadlines slip, updates come in late or in different formats, and reporting takes longer than anyone expects. A lot of time goes into chasing, checking, and reminding.
At that point, it is easy to say, “We just need to be more organised.”
Sometimes that is true. But when the same pattern shows up across several people, teams, or tasks, that is often too vague to be useful.
What looks like disorganisation is often a workflow problem instead. Work depends on memory, scattered information, unclear handoffs, and personal workarounds rather than a shared way of getting things done.
That matters because the fix is different. If the issue is structural, asking people to try harder usually adds pressure without removing the friction.
When “disorganised” keeps coming up, look past the label
When leaders describe their organisation as disorganised, they are usually noticing something real.
Things get missed. Reporting is laborious. Staff remind each other about next steps. People are not sure which spreadsheet is current. Updates arrive from different places and in different formats. Work still gets done, but often because someone is quietly holding it together.
The problem is that “we need to be more organised” describes the symptom, not the cause.
If one person is struggling in an otherwise clear system, that may point to an individual issue. But if the same friction appears across the team, across different tasks, or every time a certain kind of work comes around, it is worth looking at the workflow itself.
Repeated disorganisation often means the way work moves is unclear, inconsistent, or too dependent on individual effort.
What this often looks like in practice
In small teams, work can keep moving through goodwill and staff memory long after the underlying setup has stopped helping.
A monthly report gets pulled together by searching inboxes, checking several spreadsheets, and messaging colleagues for missing numbers. A service update is recorded in one place for day-to-day use and then entered again somewhere else for reporting. An approval sits still because the person who usually nudges it along is away, and nobody is fully sure what happens next.
From the outside, that can look like people being disorganised.
More often, it looks like this:
- people keeping their own reminder lists because the main process does not clearly show what is waiting
- the same information being tracked in different places because no one trusts a single source
- staff having to remember unwritten steps that were never properly agreed or documented
- work slowing down at handoff points because ownership is unclear
- reporting requiring manual reconstruction because information was captured differently each time
This is why “disorganised” can be a misleading label. It sounds general, but the real issue is often more specific.
The team may be spending a lot of time on hidden work: chasing, copying, checking, reconciling, re-entering, and patching things together so the job still gets done.
The issue may be workflow structure, not staff behaviour
A lot of recurring operational friction comes from basic structural gaps.
The handoff between one step and the next is unclear. The same data is entered twice. No one owns the full process from start to finish. People capture information in slightly different ways, so later reporting becomes slow and unreliable. Important follow-up depends on someone remembering rather than the work itself making the next step visible.
That is not something you fix by telling people to be more organised.
In many organisations, staff are already doing a lot of compensating work. They are covering for missing process steps, unclear responsibilities, duplicate admin, or reporting and admin systems that do not line up well with how the work actually happens.
So the problem is not always that people are failing the system. Sometimes the system is leaning too heavily on people.
Take funder reporting as a common example. A team may say reporting is stressful because people are slow to send updates or do not keep things tidy. But when you trace it back, the issue is often that data sits in different spreadsheets, notes live in email threads, and everyone records information a bit differently. By the time the report is due, staff have to reconstruct what happened from fragments and memory.
That is mainly a workflow problem.
The same applies when client or service-user information has to be entered in more than one place. Staff may look inconsistent, but the setup is creating the inconsistency. If people have to update multiple records, in different formats, at different points in the process, confusion and follow-up work are predictable.
How to tell what kind of problem you are dealing with
It helps to separate three things that often get blurred together.
It may be a people issue when the problem sits mainly with one person
If one individual is missing steps, overlooking information, or struggling to follow a process that is otherwise clear and workable for others, that may point to a capability, training, or performance issue.
The key question is whether the friction follows the person or the process.
If the rest of the team can complete the same work without the same confusion, the issue may not be structural.
It may be a capacity issue when the work is clear but there is too much of it
Sometimes people know what to do, where to record it, and who owns the next step. The process is reasonably clear. The issue is simply volume, time, or staffing.
In that case, the signs are different. Staff are not reinventing the process each time. They are overloaded.
A capacity problem often sounds like: “We know the steps, but we cannot keep up.”
It is more likely a workflow problem when the same friction shows up across roles
If multiple people are relying on memory, reminders, inbox searches, side spreadsheets, or informal nudges to keep work moving, that points more strongly to a workflow problem.
Some common signs are:
- work stalls when one key staff member is away
- the same data is entered more than once
- updates are hard to find or come in inconsistent formats
- no one is fully clear who picks something up next
- reporting requires manual reconstruction from different sources
- staff create their own tracking methods because the shared one does not quite work
When these patterns repeat, the issue is usually not that everyone needs better personal habits. It is that the organisation does not yet have a simple enough shared way of working.
If you want to go a step further with the diagnosis, this guide on How to tell if the problem is your setup, not your team is a useful companion.
What to do first
You do not need to start with a major overhaul.
A better first step is to pick one recurring pain point and look at how it actually moves today.
Choose something concrete, such as:
- monthly or funder reporting
- approvals
- grant tracking
- client onboarding
- service-user follow-up
Then map the real path of the work, not the ideal one.
Where does it start? Who touches it? Where is information captured? What gets copied or re-entered? Where does it wait? What happens if the usual person is off? At what point does someone need to chase, remind, or manually piece things together?
You are looking for a few practical things:
- where work stalls
- where ownership is unclear
- where information gets duplicated
- where people rely on staff memory instead of a shared system
- where “done” means different things to different people
Once you can see those points clearly, the next step is usually not to add something new.
It is more often to agree a simpler shared way of working: one clear place for key information, a named owner for each step, a clearer handoff, fewer duplicate entries, and less dependence on remembering.
That kind of clarity tends to reduce friction more reliably than another round of asking people to be more organised.
If you are weighing up whether the issue sits in the tool, the process, or both, Tool issue, process issue, or both? may help.
Want to get started today? Use this quick checklist to see whether “we need to be more organised” is actually pointing to a workflow problem.
