Managers lose an average of 16.5 hours each week to coordination overhead, roughly 41% of a standard 40-hour week, according to a report published in June by In Parallel, a Helsinki-based software company.
In Parallel divided the 16.5 weekly hours into three categories: 8.1 hours in status meetings, 4.6 hours re-explaining context to colleagues who already had it, and 3.8 hours searching for decisions or information that already existed. The company valued the lost time at $64,600 per manager per year, using a fully loaded hourly cost of $85 and 46 working weeks.
The survey found a gap between what managers perceived and what they itemized. Asked directly, managers estimated they lost 21% of their week to coordination. Asked to add up specific hours, the same managers reported 41%. Department heads and directors itemized 20.1 hours per week while self-reporting a loss of 23%.
Tool count showed the strongest measured relationship to coordination hours, with a correlation of 0.42. Teams using one to three applications reported about 13.4 hours per week, while teams using more than 10 tools reported 32.1 hours. Shared documents, email, Slack or Teams threads, personal notes and project management software were the most commonly cited tools.
The report also examined workplace AI use. It found that 86% of managers use AI at work, and that daily users reported higher coordination loads than non-users, 20.3 hours per week against 9.1. Among AI users, 91% said they load context manually before an assistant becomes useful for work, and 55% spend three or more minutes per session re-explaining information their team already knows.
Asked how many hours an AI assistant with access to their team’s shared context would save them, managers estimated 4.4 hours per week, or about 27% of the measured overhead. Daily AI users estimated 5.9 hours.
Managers said they would use recovered time for strategic thinking, cited by 53%, and for developing people, cited by 47%. Six percent said they would leave work earlier.
In Parallel sells a product it describes as a shared context layer connecting AI tools to organizational memory. The company said its survey figures are self-reported and should be read as directional rather than audited.
