This article draws on the experience of educational institutions in Japan.
"Only that teacher knows how it works." "When the person in charge is out, everything stops." These are familiar situations in the administrative offices of schools and cram schools. In Japan this is called "zokujinka": work that has come to depend on specific individuals, so that only certain people know how to do it. Now that handovers and hiring are both getting harder, fixing it is directly tied to keeping a school running smoothly. This article explains why school administration ends up this way, the risks involved, and concrete steps to fix it.
What is "zokujinka"?
Zokujinka describes a situation where work relies on the experience and memory of particular staff members, so it can't get done without them. In school administration it tends to show up across a wide range of work: student recruitment, applications, enrollment records, grades, and communication with parents. Work that requires specialist knowledge, such as supporting international students, is especially likely to end up concentrated in a few people's hands.
Why school administration is prone to depending on individuals
- Work such as student recruitment and applications rises and falls with the season, so procedures rarely get written down
- Information is scattered across individuals' Excel files and email
- Specialist matters such as residence status (the visa category that allows international students to stay in Japan) fall to particular staff members
- Teams are small and people wear several hats, so there's no time to teach procedures to others
The risks of depending on individuals
- Work stops every time someone goes on leave, resigns or hands over their duties
- When mistakes or missed follow-ups happen, no one else notices
- Improvements stall, and overtime becomes the norm
- Management can't see what is actually happening on the ground
Five steps to end dependence on specific individuals
- Make the work visible — Write down who does what, and how. Start by understanding the current state.
- Turn procedures into templates — Move the "how" out of individuals' heads and into procedures and forms that everyone can share.
- Consolidate information in one place — Stop relying on personal Excel files and email, so that everyone involved sees the same data.
- Use a system so the result is the same no matter who does the work — Put data entry and checking workflows into a system, so quality doesn't depend on who is in charge.
- Leave routine work to AI — Let AI handle supporting tasks such as document checks and reminders, so people can focus on judgment and conversations.
The key is not to change everything at once. The realistic approach is to work in order, from making work visible to standardizing it to putting it into a system, starting with the work that causes the most trouble.
Start by building a system for applications and student management
Applications and student management are where dependence on individuals is especially common. Bringing information from the first inquiry through applications and enrollment into a single system lets the work run at the same quality even when the person in charge changes.
At one educational institution that adopted Compass, our student application and management system, the application and administrative work for roughly 440 applicants, which used to take six to eight staff members, is now handled by one or two. Being able to keep things running with fewer people also means that dependence on specific individuals has been greatly reduced.
Summary
Dependence on individuals is not a people problem; it is a systems problem. Make the work visible, standardize it, and put it into a system. If you follow that order, you can resolve it step by step, slowly but surely.
XY, K.K. works from firsthand knowledge of how schools operate. We build and deploy systems that actually work in day-to-day operations, and we stay involved until they take hold (the FDE approach). If too much of your school's work depends on a few people, feel free to contact us.