What's Killing Efficiency: The Hidden Cost of Hunting for Answers

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What everyday workplace hassle is quietly eroding your company’s productivity? For many businesses in Australia and New Zealand, it’s the simple act of hunting for information. Employees spend countless hours each week searching through emails, digging in shared folders, or pinging coworkers with questions - all just to find answers they need to do their jobs.

It seems trivial, but the impact is massive. New Zealanders already work longer hours than workers in other OECD countries, yet produce far less output per hour ($68 vs $85) reddit.com. Across the Tasman, Australia’s productivity growth has slumped to its lowest rate in 60 years theguardian.com.

Clearly, something is holding us back. One major culprit is hiding in plain sight: knowledge trapped in silos, fragmented systems, and “tribal” know-how that isn’t shared. In this article, we’ll unpack the hidden cost of all that inefficiency - and why it’s high time we tackle the problem head-on.

Too Much Time Spent Finding Information

One of the biggest drains on efficiency is the time lost just trying to find information. How often have you or your team wasted half the morning sifting through email threads or digging in a cluttered server for a document? It happens everywhere. In fact, various studies have found that employees spend 20–30% of their workday searching for information instead of doing productive work proprofskb.com. That equates to 1.8 hours per day on the low end, and some reports put it at over 3 hours each day lost to information-hunting itbrief.co.nz. To put that into perspective, if you have five employees, effectively one of them might be occupied full-time just searching for answers rather than contributing value proprofskb.com. It’s like paying for five pairs of hands but only getting four.

This problem shows up in all kinds of businesses:

• Multi-unit franchises often have staff and managers scrambling to find the latest policy update or marketing template buried in an intranet or email inbox.
  
  
• Mid-market construction or logistics firms see project engineers calling around to different departments for data that should be readily available - site plans, inventory levels, you name it.
  
  
• Insurance brokers and agents might have to comb through several systems just to retrieve a client’s history or an underwriting guideline.
  
  

All that time adds up. One survey found employees waste at least 2 hours a day looking for documents, information, or people required to do their jobs hcamag.com. That’s 25% of the work week gone. No wonder nearly half of employees in that survey said searching for what they need at work is more painful than a trip to the dentist hcamag.com! And in a newer study, 47% of employees reported feeling burned out or frustrated because they don’t have quick access to the info required for success in their role itbrief.co.nz.

The hidden cost here isn’t just in hours wasted – it’s in opportunities missed and a slower pace of business. When your team spends the morning chasing an answer, that’s time not spent on serving customers, closing sales, or improving operations. It also drags down responsiveness. For example, a client waiting on an answer might get fed up with delays, or a field worker might sit idle until they get the go-ahead from someone who is still looking up a detail. In competitive industries, this lost agility can be fatal. Simply put: if your people are constantly hunting for information, your organisation moves at a crawl.

Tribal Knowledge Bottlenecks

If information isn’t written down or centrally accessible, where does it live? Too often, it lives in someone’s head.

This is the realm of “tribal knowledge” - the unwritten know-how that only certain veterans or specialists possess. Relying on tribal knowledge can create huge bottlenecks. Work grinds to a halt when the one person who knows how to approve a special request or troubleshoot a legacy system is out of office.

Every organisation has examples of this. In a franchise network, a long-time franchisee might be the go-to for how to handle an unusual customer complaint. In a mid-sized firm, you often hear “Ask Bob, he’s the only one who knows how that system works.”

The reality is that a lot of institutional knowledge never gets captured or passed on. For example, one survey found 57% of baby boomers have imparted half or less of their job knowledge to their successors (and about one in five haven’t shared any of it) helpjuice.com. 

When that knowledge walks out the door, companies feel the pain in mistakes, rework, and slower ramp-up for new staff.

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The Infrastructure Gap - Fragmented Systems and Silos

Why is so much knowledge so hard to find in the first place? A big part of the problem is fragmented information systems.

Over the years, companies have added a patchwork of tools, databases, and storage locations. Instead of one central source of truth, you end up with dozens. The result? Information gets siloed.

• The average organisation today uses around 254 different software applications productiv.com.
  
  
• Mid-sized companies of 500–2,500 staff have about 255 apps on average chiefmartec.com.
  
  
• Businesses under 500 employees still average 172 apps in their tech stack chiefmartec.com.
  
  

That’s a staggering number of places where data might live. Unsurprisingly, 47% of employees say that essential information is spread across too many applications itbrief.co.nz.

This silo effect hits hard in:

• Franchise operations (e.g., POS systems, SharePoint, email, and manuals).
  
  
• Construction/logistics (e.g., inventory, procurement, project tools, and spreadsheets).
  
  
• Insurance (e.g., CRM, policy docs, quote tools, commissions spreadsheets).
  
  

Siloed data leads to delays, duplicate work, and frustration - the antithesis of smart operations.

Repetitive, Low-Value Work Bogging Teams Down

All of these issues - hard-to-find info, tribal knowledge gaps, fragmented systems - lead to another outcome: repetitive, manual work.

A 2024 study showed employees waste 8.7 hours per week on low-value tasks such as admin and inefficient processes thestepstonegroup.com.

For a company of 50 people, that’s the equivalent of losing 10 full-time contributors each year.

In franchises, managers often compile reports by hand because systems don’t talk to each other. In construction, project updates require copy-paste from system to system. In insurance, brokers re-type info across insurer platforms.

Not only is this work demoralising - it’s error-prone, unscalable, and distracts from higher-value activities.

Why More Tools Aren’t Solving the Problem

Adding more tools hasn’t solved the problem - it’s often made it worse.

Without integration, each new app becomes another place to search. Many mid-market firms adopt tools with good intentions but poor execution. The result? Less than half of company apps are regularly used productiv.com.

And because 58% of NZ businesses struggle to create clear ROI models for AI or automation initiatives [Productivity Commission, 2022], they hesitate to invest in more robust fixes.

The Way Forward: Connected Knowledge and Smarter Workflows

Eliminating these efficiency killers isn’t about working harder – it’s about working smarter. The solution starts with connecting the dots: integrating knowledge and processes so that the right information finds the right people at the right time. Instead of your team hunting for answers, the answers should come to them with minimal effort. Achieving this requires a combination of cultural and technological shifts:

• Break down the silos. Companies should strive to create a unified knowledge hub or at least a well-integrated network of systems. This doesn’t mean one monolithic software to replace everything, but rather ensuring that your various tools can “talk” to each other and surface information in a central, accessible way. For example, if a franchise operator has a ops question, they might search a single portal that pulls relevant SOPs, guidelines, or past Q&A from across the company’s systems. Modern enterprise search tools (often powered by AI) can index multiple data sources so that employees have one search bar to query, instead of ten different logins. The easier it is to search (and actually find results), the less time will be wasted. As a bonus, integrating systems cuts down on duplicate data entry – update a record in one place and it updates everywhere, saving those manual keystrokes.
  
  
• Capture and share tribal knowledge. Culturally, organisations need to value documentation and knowledge transfer. Encourage your experienced team members to formalize their know-how – whether through mentoring programs or by contributing to a knowledge base. Even simple steps like recording short “how-to” videos or writing quick FAQs can extract golden information from people’s heads and make it available to all. When onboarding new staff, emphasize using the knowledge resources before resorting to asking someone, to build that habit of self-service. Some businesses are even leveraging AI to help with this: for instance, using AI tools to capture insights from past project notes or chat logs and organize them for future reference. The goal is to reduce single points of failure. No one person should solely hold critical knowledge. By democratizing information, you’ll speed up everyone’s work and reduce those bottlenecks when someone is away.
  
  
• Streamline and automate repetitive tasks. Take a hard look at those 8+ hours a week of “low-value” work and identify what can be automated or simplified. Often, this doesn’t require cutting-edge AI – sometimes a straightforward workflow automation or a better integration between two systems can eliminate hours of drudgery. For instance, if your insurance brokers are retyping data from emails into a policy system, consider an intake form that feeds the system directly. If managers are manually compiling reports, set up a dashboard that auto-generates the reports from real-time data. Where more advanced tech like AI can help is in tasks like drafting documents or answering common questions. Today’s AI assistants can, for example, generate a first draft of a report or pull relevant information to answer a query in seconds, which an employee can then refine. By offloading routine work to machines, you free up human time for the creative, strategic, and relationship-focused aspects of the job. As one expert aptly said, when companies use modern technology to take over repetitive tasks, it enables people to devote their time to more meaningful and productive activities that match their skillsthestepstonegroup.com. The outcome is not just higher productivity, but also employees who are more engaged (because they’re doing work that matters, not busywork).
  
  
• Simplify processes and improve communication. Often, inefficiency is baked into “how we do things” — maybe a report needs three sign-offs when one would do, or information has to pass through unnecessary layers. Streamlining these processes can remove a lot of hunting and waiting. For example, empower frontline employees with more information and decision-making ability so they don’t always need manager approval for small things. Encourage cross-functional teams to document and agree on processes in a transparent way. Employees themselves often have great ideas on removing friction; involve them in redesigning workflows. Better communication is part of this: ensure that when something changes (a new policy, a new system, etc.), it’s communicated clearly and stored in an easily findable place. The days of important memos being lost in an email avalanche should be behind us.
  
  

What’s critical in all of the above is thinking in terms of systems, not isolated fixes. A connected, integrated approach is key. It might mean choosing software that plays nicely together (or using integration platforms to bridge them). It definitely means prioritizing a single source of truth for key knowledge – whether it’s a company wiki, an intranet, or a knowledge management system – and driving adoption so that it becomes second nature for employees to use it. And it means automating not for the sake of having flashy tech, but to genuinely relieve pain points that your staff experience daily.

For multi-unit franchises, the payoff of these changes would be huge: consistency and efficiency across all locations, faster rollout of best practices, and less dependency on any one superstar manager to keep things running. For mid-market B2B firms in construction, logistics, and similar fields, it could translate to projects staying on schedule with fewer costly delays, because everyone can get the info they need without a dozen phone calls. For insurance brokers and financial services, it means serving clients faster and more accurately – which is a competitive edge in an industry where timely information is everything.

On a national level, if more Australian and New Zealand businesses embrace integrated workflows and knowledge-sharing, it could help close that productivity gap we opened with. Imagine if those hours currently lost to “hunting for answers” were reinvested into innovation, customer service, or training – the boost to output (not to mention employee well-being) would be significant. It’s encouraging that both countries recognize these issues: initiatives around digital transformation, the push for better infrastructure and training, and even government-led reports are all nudging in this direction. The technology to solve these problems is more accessible than ever – from cloud platforms to AI assistants – but it requires the will to implement them in a coordinated way.

In conclusion, the hidden cost of operational inefficiency – the time and energy drained by searching for information, navigating siloed systems, relying on unwritten knowledge, and performing tedious manual tasks – is something businesses can no longer afford to ignore. The first step is shining a light on it, which hopefully we’ve done here. The next step is action: rethinking how your organisation manages knowledge and equips its people. By building connected systems and smarter workflows, you enable your team to spend more time doing actual work and less time hunting for answers. In a world where every competitive advantage matters, tackling these internal inefficiencies could be the game-changer that propels your business forward – turning wasted hours into productive output, and frustrated employees into high-performing, empowered teams. It’s time to stop letting hidden inefficiencies kill your efficiency, and start unleashing the full potential of your people with the information, tools, and time they need to excel.

A Final Thought

The hidden cost of inefficiency is real - and in sectors like franchises, construction, and insurance, it’s magnified.

If Australian and New Zealand businesses want to close the productivity gap, reduce burnout, and move faster - tackling internal friction is step one.

You don’t need more tools. You need smarter ones that talk to each other - and a culture that makes knowledge accessible by default.

It’s time to stop hunting for answers - and start building organisations where the answers find you.

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