22 September 2026
What would you do with an extra 21 hours a week?
That's roughly two and a half working days. Enough time for a strategy day, a full round of 1:1s with your team, or finally starting that skills framework you've been meaning to get to.
For many L&D and compliance teams, that time already exists — it's just being spent on admin instead: chasing managers for sign-off, sending reminder after reminder, manually renewing training that's about to lapse, and working out which of your 350 courses a new starter actually needs.
We wanted to know what that admin actually costs in hours, so we modelled it for a typical mid-to-large organisation.
The scenario
Picture an organisation with 2,600 employees spread across 196 locations, running 23 mandatory compliance courses out of a wider library of 350. Nothing unusual — this is a fairly ordinary profile for a business in a regulated sector.
Breaking the admin down into its component parts:
- Sending compliance reports to managers — roughly 196 managers, each needing a tailored report pulled and sent on a regular cycle
- Chasing renewals and reminders — with hundreds of course renewals falling due across the workforce every week, each one typically needing at least one reminder message, sometimes two
- Manually renewing recurring training — resetting the record once each cycle completes, one course and one person at a time
- Assigning role-specific training to new starters — working out the right course bundle for each new joiner's role and location, every single week
Add it up, and the manual version of this work comes to roughly 21 hours a week — the equivalent of two to three full working days, spent entirely on admin rather than on the parts of L&D that actually move the needle: coaching managers, building better content, or working out what skills the business will need next year.
How we worked this out
Worth being upfront about this: 21 hours is a modelled estimate, not a measurement of any single customer. We built it from reasonable assumptions about course load per employee, renewal frequency, and staff turnover — the kind of numbers most organisations of this size fall somewhere near, but rarely match exactly.
Company profile: 2,600 employees · 196 locations · 23 compliance courses · 350 total courses
| Workflow | Key assumption | Weekly admin time |
|---|---|---|
| Manager compliance reports | ~196 managers (1/location); monthly report cycle; 8 min to pull, tailor and send each one manually |
~6.0 hrs |
| Reminder messages (employees + managers) |
Avg employee is enrolled on 6 of the 23 compliance courses; 12-month renewal cycle → ~300 renewal events due/week; avg 1.2 reminder messages sent per event (most respond to the first nudge, some need a follow-up or manager escalation) at 1.5 min each |
~9.0 hrs |
| Renewing recurring assignments (re-enrolling/ resetting the record once a cycle completes) |
Same ~300 events/week; ~1 min per manual renewal action | ~5.0 hrs |
| New-starter role assignment | 12% annual turnover → ~6 new starters/week; 12 min each to map role/site to the right course bundle from the 350-course catalogue and assign it |
~1.2 hrs/week |
| Total | ~21 hours/week |
So roughly 21 hours a week — about 2.5–3 working days — of manual admin this organisation is likely spending on tasks that Breeio LMS fully automates. That's a substantial chunk of a full-time role, which tracks with why organisations at this scale often have someone whose job is largely this.
The two assumptions that move this number the most:
Average compliance courses per employee (we used 6 of 23) — if it's closer to 10 because more roles are safety/site-critical, the reminders-and-renewals line roughly doubles.
Turnover rate (we used 12%) — manufacturing-heavy workforces often run 15–20%, which would push the new-starter line up but only by a couple of hours at most, since it's the smallest component.
Because of that sensitivity, we'd treat 21 hours as a realistic mid-point rather than a guarantee — the honest range for an organisation like this is somewhere between 15 and 28 hours a week, depending on those two factors. A useful rule of thumb, if you want to size this for your own organisation: roughly 8 hours a week for every 1,000 employees, for a business with a similarly distributed, compliance-heavy training load.
If you want a number specific to your organisation rather than a modelled one, that's exactly the kind of thing our team can work through with you directly.
What would 21 hours a week actually mean for your team?
Time back rarely stays as "time back" for long — it goes somewhere. The question worth asking is, "Where will you invest it?"
For most L&D teams, that's the difference between spending the week keeping the lights on and spending it on the work their organisation's need most: developing the leaders the business will need in five years, closing skills gaps before they become business risks, and proving — with real reporting, not a spreadsheet stitched together the night before an audit — that learning is actually landing.
That's the gap Breeio is built to close: automating the admin behind mandatory learning, so your team gets the hours back to focus on what only L&D can do.
Want to know what this looks like for your organisation? Talk to our team and we'll help you work out a number that's actually yours.