Lost in the Loop: UK Workers ‘Waste 520 Hours a Year Searching for Job Info’

British businesses are haemorrhaging time and money as workers spend up to two hours a day searching for the information they need to do their jobs, a new report has revealed.

According to a survey by visual collaboration firm Lucid, this “efficiency gap” is costing employers as much as 520 hours annually per employee, equating to around £12,900 of the average UK knowledge worker’s salary.

The findings, from Lucid’s Work Acceleration Survey and drawn from a poll taken in March 2025 of UK knowledge workers, suggest that nearly half (48%) believe standardising process documentation could claw back up to 10 hours a week — time currently lost to duplicated efforts, unclear workflows and fragmented systems.

Widening Gap Between UK and Global Productivity Leaders

With UK productivity growth lagging 19% behind that of the United States, Lucid warned that information silos and inefficient collaboration tools are holding back economic performance. The firm dubs this bottleneck “the acceleration equation”. That’s a formula where clarity, alignment and execution must be in sync to drive growth.

But in practice, the picture is bleak. More than four in ten (44%) UK workers say they fail to meet objectives due to missing information, while 31% blame poor communication for project delays or failures. A further 34% admit to recreating documents or processes from scratch due to inaccessible data.

System Overload and Tool Fatigue

Even with an abundance of digital tools at their disposal, British workers report that more tech is not always better. Nearly a third (29%) use between six and ten systems daily, yet a quarter say having too many tools is their biggest barrier to finding information. This overload not only slows decision-making but also increases the risk of misalignment across teams.

“In today’s fast-moving workplace, clarity can’t be optional. Workers are spending too much time searching for basic information needed to do their job which is crippling productivity and making it more difficult to move projects forward,” said Dan Lawyer, chief product officer at Lucid.

“To move work forward, teams need clearer, more centralised information that integrates with how they already work — solutions that drive visibility, alignment and execution, not just more notifications.”

A Call for Clarity

Consensus is another casualty of inefficient systems. Four in ten workers say it takes up to three hours to agree on what work needs to be done, and 37% leave meetings unclear about their next steps. Unsurprisingly, nearly half (47%) say their project teams lack alignment.

Experts say centralised knowledge-sharing platforms, clearer communication protocols and leaner tech stacks could help reverse the trend. But with technical limitations and enforcement challenges cited as major barriers by over 40% of respondents, implementing change will take more than new software.

Experts say the results are a wake-up call for UK employers hoping to boost productivity and employee wellbeing. Information gaps not only waste time but erode morale, fuel frustration and increase the risk of burnout.

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