Global survey reveals the amount of time wasted by workers hunting information

An Atlassian survey of 12,000 workers across six countries has concluded they lose almost 10 hours a week hunting information buried in email threads, Slack channels and siloed systems.

Atlassian Teamwork Lab head Molly Sands.

If you feel you’re drowning in emails and spreadsheets, you’re not wrong: Australian knowledge workers spend almost 25 per cent of their working lives just trying to find the data and information they need to get their job done.

That’s the finding from an Atlassian survey of 12,000 workers across six countries which looked at the poor systems and bad behaviour which cut productivity and reduce time for more creative tasks.

The report claims workers lose almost 10 hours a week hunting down information buried in email threads, Slack channels, and siloed systems – and often end up not finding it anyway. Atlassian’s Teamwork Lab head, Molly Sands, said we need to change the way we work if we are to use AI successfully in teams.

“AI is incredibly useful when it’s used for teamwork; if teams can communicate in ways that feed information into those AI models, they’re going to make it a lot easier for people to not just get bombarded by information notifications, but to get useful context,” she said.

The report found that while bosses back the idea of teamwork, almost 40 per cent say collaborating with other teams slows down their work.

More than 50 per cent of Australian knowledge workers say their work is delayed because they are waiting for information from other teams and about the same percentage fear they are often duplicating work – reinventing the wheel – because they don’t realise it’s already been completed by someone else in the organisation.

The report says the solution lies in more use of “discoverable pages’, shared videos and centralised platforms for documenting important decisions and progress.

Ms Sands, who is based in San Francisco, told The Australian that Atlassian’s new AI technology was “focused on unleashing information within organisations and getting everyone the right information at the right time”.

“But we also think about the ways that teams need to work in order to make that possible,” she said. “That’s where a lot of the gap is with AI today; you really need to be communicating and collaborating in ways that build up that organisational knowledge base.”

She said there was no ideal number of hours we should spend looking for data, but any time spent searching for information we can’t find is not useful.

“I would love to see searching without success drop down to zero. If we get our time back, we can invest it in anything, and one of the main things we want people to invest that in is real creativity and collaboration,” she said.

“When people reach out to their teammates, it should be for creative ideas generation, or for thoughtful conversation, or to ask meaningful questions; not just to say, ‘hey, I need to interrupt you even though it’s outside your working hours, because I can’t find the status of this task, and so I don’t know what to do’.

“It’s not necessarily that a spreadsheet is bad, but it’s when information might be in a spreadsheet, or maybe it’s in an email, or maybe someone said it in a meeting, and I have no idea which of those places to go to or how to find and retrieve it using AI.

“That information isn’t useful because it’s locked away and it’s too confusing to navigate.”

She conceded there was “too much information” in today’s world and “figuring out what your audience really needs to know is super important”.

Indeed it’s a skill set that will set people apart in future.

“If you’re a really good communicator, meaning you know what to communicate, how to communicate it, you are going to fare much better in this information drenched landscape that we live in,” Ms Sands said.

Originally published as Global survey reveals the amount of time wasted by workers hunting information