Organisational drag
Poor communication costs US companies $12,506 per employee a year.
US survey, Grammarly and The Harris Poll, 2022
That is business leaders’ own estimate: their teams lose 7.47 hours a week to unclear messages, follow-ups and rework. Add extra layers, sign-offs and internal rules, and the bill grows. Six numbers give you a rough figure for your company. Then we show how to turn the estimate into a measurement and bring the drag down.
7.47 h1
lost per person each week to poor communication, by US business leaders’ own estimate.
1 : 4.72
managers and administrators to everyone else, US average in 2014. Hamel and Zanini think 1 : 10 is achievable.
16%3
of non-managerial staff’s time goes to complying with internal rules, an Australian survey found. 12–24% of those rules add little value.
What does drag cost your company?
We compare your structure with an average company of the same size, using the same studies. Rough numbers are fine.
Estimated drag per year
€8.2m
About average
Where the drag comes from
Structural overhead
Managers and administrators above the 1 : 10 ratio Hamel and Zanini consider achievable. As layers grow, fewer people hear directly from customers and more sign-offs sit between an idea and a decision.
Internal-rule busywork
Reports, approvals and forms that exist for the organisation rather than its customers. Most rules made sense once; the cost is in the ones nobody revisits.
Poor communication
Hours spent decoding, chasing and redoing. Distance makes it worse: when Microsoft went fully remote, the share of collaboration across groups fell by about a quarter.4
None of these numbers tells you what to change. Only a measurement in your own company does.