Chasing attendance is not engagement work

Part of a single argument: the engagement gap is a workload problem.

A large share of the effort around sessions goes into getting people to turn up or to finish: reminders, chasers, rescheduling, escalations, tracking who still has not started. In some teams this is the single biggest line item, and none of it improves the session by a single minute.

It is displacement, not preparation

The hour spent chasing is an hour not spent on the content or the follow-up. That would be a reasonable trade if attendance were the binding constraint, and it usually is not.

The reason chasing wins is that it has a visible deadline and preparation does not. The session is on Thursday and the list of non-responders is right there. Improving the material has no deadline at all, so it loses, every week, to a task that is genuinely less valuable.

The result is a team that reliably fills rooms for sessions that are getting slowly worse.

Why it is so hard to stop

Because it feels like progress in a way that most work does not. There is a list. The list gets shorter. At the end of the afternoon you can see what you did.

Content improvement offers none of that. You cannot see it, it is not finished, and nobody will thank you on Thursday. Given the choice under pressure, most people will take the list, and they are not being irrational: they are responding to the only feedback available.

Automate the mechanical part

Reminders, calendar holds, nudges to people who have not started, escalation after a threshold. These are rules. Anything expressible as a rule should not be occupying a person's afternoon.

What remains after automation is a small number of cases that genuinely need a conversation, usually because something else is wrong. That is a much better use of the same person, and it is work that actually resolves rather than recurring next month.

Attendance is often the wrong target anyway

For self-paced material especially, chasing attendance is chasing a proxy. What you actually want is that people understood something. Someone who skimmed under duress at four o'clock on a Friday supplies attendance and supplies nothing else.

Switching the measure to comprehension tends to reduce the chasing by itself, because it makes visible how little the chasing was buying. It is quite common for a team to discover that the cohort they spent two weeks chasing scored no better than the ones who never responded, which settles the argument faster than any amount of principle.

Where the recovered time should go

Deliberately to follow-up, not back into the general pool.

Follow-up has the highest return of any part of the cycle and gets cut first, so time that is merely freed will be absorbed by whatever has the nearest deadline. It needs assigning, in advance, to the thing that has no deadline of its own.

This is a small piece of management rather than a tooling change, and it is the difference between automation producing an improvement and automation producing slightly more slack.