Somebody stops your technician in the hallway. Hey, while you’re here, the light in 204 is flickering. He fixes it in four minutes. Everybody’s happy.

Nothing about that transaction is wrong. It’s responsive, it’s friendly, it’s exactly the service culture you want.

And it never happened. Not in any record, not in any report, not in any number you’ll present at budget time. Multiply it by fifteen a week across three technicians and you have roughly a quarter of your department’s output existing nowhere.

What the side channel actually costs

• Your volume is understated. When you report 214 work orders, the real number was closer to 280. You’re being evaluated on a fraction of what you produced.
• Your planned-versus-reactive ratio is fiction. Side-channel requests are almost entirely reactive. Leaving them out makes your operation look more controlled than it is — flattering, and useless for decision-making.
• Asset history has holes. The three times someone grabbed a tech about the same unit never attached to that unit. When you build the replacement case, the evidence is missing.
• Priority is set by proximity. Whoever physically finds a technician gets served first. That’s not triage, and the people who follow your process learn they’re at the back of the line.
• You can’t defend the work. When someone says facilities never responded, you have no record either way. Undocumented work is indistinguishable from work that never occurred.

Why banning it fails

The usual response is an email: all requests must go through the system. It works for about nine days.

It fails because the side channel isn’t a discipline problem, it’s a friction problem. People take the fastest path to a fixed light. If your intake process takes four minutes and a text takes ten seconds, the text wins — permanently, no matter how many reminders you send.

And your technicians won’t enforce it. Telling a teacher or a nurse “submit a ticket” feels rude, so they’ll just fix it and say nothing. Now the policy has made your visibility worse, because the work still happens and now it’s actively hidden.

Make the front door easier than the side door

The only durable fix is to beat the text message on convenience.

1. No login for requestors. Requiring an account from someone who submits two requests a year guarantees they’ll text instead. A link that works with no password removes the biggest single barrier.
2. Ask for almost nothing. Where, what, who to contact. Every additional required field costs you submissions. You can gather detail later; you can’t gather a request that was never made.
3. Put the link where people already are. QR codes at entrances and in break rooms. A bookmark in the staff portal. The intranet homepage. If someone has to search for it, they’ll text you.
4. Confirm receipt automatically. Most side-channel behavior comes from a fear of the void. People text because a text gets a reply and a form feels like a black hole. An automatic acknowledgment fixes that in one step.

The rule for the hallway

You won’t eliminate the hallway request, and you shouldn’t try. Immediate response is a genuine strength of a small department.

So change the rule from “don’t do it” to this:

Fix it now if you can. Then log it before the end of the shift.

The tech stays helpful, the requester gets immediate service, and the record gets made. It’s a retroactive work order — completed on creation, thirty seconds of typing, done from a phone in the hallway.

That single habit is usually the difference between a department that can prove its value and one that can only assert it.

Find out how bad it is

For one week, ask your team to make a tally mark every time they’re asked for something outside the system. No detail, no judgment — just a mark.

Compare that count to your logged work orders for the same week. That number is how much of your department is currently invisible — and it’s usually the most persuasive argument you’ll ever make for fixing intake.