Poor teamwork could be costing the UK economy an estimated £136bn annually through delays, duplicated work, and missed opportunities, according to new research examining the financial impact of workplace disconnection.
Performance psychology organisation Mindflick surveyed 1,028 HR and people professionals, combining their reported experiences with Office for National Statistics data to estimate the value of working time lost through ineffective collaboration.
The organisation calculates that these losses could be equivalent to 1.64 million full-time working years, representing approximately 4.5% of UK gross domestic product.
The £136bn estimate is an economic extrapolation rather than a direct measure of losses recorded by employers. It assumes that time reported as lost through disconnection can be assigned an economic value across the wider workforce.
The underlying survey nevertheless identifies several operational problems reported by HR professionals.
Some 61% of respondents said their organisation had missed a target, deadline, or commercial opportunity during the previous three months.
A further 34% reported work being delayed or duplicated at least once a week, suggesting that communication and coordination problems occur regularly in a substantial proportion of the organisations represented.
Despite those reported difficulties, only 19% said their organisation formally measured the financial costs associated with poor teamwork.
Mindflick estimates that workplace disconnection accounts for approximately 14 working days of lost productivity per employee annually.
For a team of ten people, its modelling places the equivalent annual cost at approximately £67,000, although the amount would vary according to employee costs, working arrangements, and the extent of the problems involved.
Management time absorbed by coordination problems —
The research also identifies the demands that ineffective collaboration can place on managers.
Nearly one-quarter of respondents said they or their managers spent six hours or more each week dealing with people-related difficulties.
Such problems can involve resolving misunderstandings, clarifying responsibilities, addressing disagreements, or correcting work that has been duplicated or completed incorrectly.
The consequences are particularly relevant to organisations where responsibilities are shared across different departments or depend on several people contributing to the same project.
Mindflick’s modelling suggests that the loss of working time increases with company size.
Employees in large organisations are estimated to lose the equivalent of a full working month annually, compared with just under three weeks among smaller and medium-sized businesses.
For a company employing 10,000 people, the organisation estimates that working time lost through disconnection could represent approximately 786 full-time employees.
These figures describe the estimated value of lost productivity rather than employees who are absent or positions that could necessarily be removed.
Dr Pete Lindsay, performance psychologist at Mindflick, said: “You can bring together ten highly capable people and still end up with a team that underperforms. Individual talent only gets you so far.”
He argued that organisations often devote more attention to individual performance than to how employees communicate, challenge decisions, and coordinate their responsibilities.
The study does not establish a direct causal relationship between reported teamwork problems and the national economic estimate. Nor does a survey of HR professionals provide the same evidence as time-recording data gathered across the entire workforce.
It does, however, identify recurring operational difficulties that organisations could examine through their own performance measures, including delayed work, repeated tasks, and the management time spent resolving internal problems.
With fewer than one in five respondents reporting formal measurement of the associated costs, the findings also indicate that many employers lack a quantified view of how collaboration problems affect their operations.
