Dive Brief:
- Employees could be losing as much as 10.5% of their workweek to looking for places to meet, coordinating in-person time with their team and navigating conflicting schedules, according to a study conducted by the Collab Collective in partnership with operations platform Robin.
- The research called these challenges “workplace friction,” and said the time lost can cost an average midsized company about $9 million a year. The main culprit of workplace friction is hybrid offices, per the report, which examined the issues that can arise when teams and employees aren’t effectively coordinated.
- Almost half (47%) of employees surveyed said workplace friction was “a significant drag on their day-to-day productivity,” and 60% of workplace operations professionals said the problem had increased over the past year. Meanwhile, just 12% of workplace operations professionals said the friction had declined.
Dive Insight:
The study collected responses from more than 500 employees and workplace operations professionals in the U.S. and Canada, and found that workplace friction is an issue that can be hard to pinpoint due to the different ways employees experience hybrid office environments.
“Workplace operations teams see friction as a systemic problem because they’re the ones fielding the escalations,” Craig Durr, chief analyst and founder of the Collab Collective, said in a statement. “Employees just experience it as one more frustrating moment in their day, and that mismatch is exactly why point solutions haven’t solved this.”
According to the report, hybrid offices have an “annual coordination tax,” which researchers calculated based on employees’ estimates of time spent on workplace coordination, as well as compensation benchmarks from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. The study estimated that annual losses due to the resulting workplace friction can be as much as $14,000 per worker.
Hybrid workplaces are becoming more common as return-to-office mandates alter the balance between fully remote employees and fully on-site workers.
The system may be stabilizing, though. A 2025 Gallup poll found that hybrid work has leveled out since the end of 2022. About half of the surveyed workplaces decided to keep their hybrid models, while both fully on-site work and fully remote work have become slightly more popular. Furthermore, employees who identified as on-site but remote-capable said their teams are now active across multiple different work locations, growing from 13% in 2023 to 27% in 2025.
