Coordination Crisis in Modern Tech Work
Over 50% reported spending 25–50% of their week on "work about work”. What is the root cause of it? How can we improve that? Can AI help?
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Let’s get back to this week’s thought.
Intro
I had the pleasure of attending the event called: The Coordination Crisis Summit at the University of Maryland last week.
Steady, University of Maryland - A. James Clark School of Engineering and AlphaROC recently conducted a survey with a goal to understand what’s really slowing teams down in today’s distributed work environments.
What's been really interesting to see is that over half of the survey respondents said they spend 25–50% of their week on “work about work”.
We had sessions, breakouts and panel discussions to see what we can do to improve in this area.
I am sharing the overview of the survey and my opinion associated with the results together with the ideas for improvements in today's article!
Was really great to meet with these great professionals:
Henry Poydar, CEO Steady
John Johnson, Lead Faculty, Project Management Center for Excellence
Daniel Forrester, Chief Growth Officer and Advisor
Uma HS, Former PMI WDC President Portfolio Exec Advisor
Damien Peters, UMD Faculty, Product Managemet Expert
Kathleen Walch, Director of AI Engagement and Learning
Let’s get straight into the survey next!
1. The Coordination Crisis Survey
A survey was conducted recently with 994 tech and knowledge workers in the United States with the goal of understanding what’s really slowing teams down in today’s distributed work environments.
The finding?
Over half of survey respondents said they spend 25–50% (or more) of their week on “work about work”, such as aligning stakeholders, attending status meetings, managing tools, and chasing approvals.
The consequences of this can often be hidden, but there are 2 likely outcomes based on the survey results:
Individuals and teams having unnecessary meetings, inefficient systems, silos, delays and there is a potential for burnout.
Customers experiencing consequences from miscommunications, slower service and bigger costs.
Here are some of the important results:
37.9% of people reported that excessive meetings are the contributors to inefficiencies.
36.9% reported that slow decision-making and approvals is slowing them down.
29.4% mentioned that knowledge is scattered across disconnected tools.
30.5% of people have mentioned that coordination breakdowns lead to rework and errors.
28.3% said these costs are felt directly by customers in the form of missed deadlines, price increases or reduced experiences.
You can download the full survey report below:
Make sure to follow along the article for my opinions and comments on specific data insights.
Let’s go to specific questions and the results next.
1.1 Survey Results
State of the Coordination Crisis
As we can see from the results, over half of the people reported they spend 25–50% (or more) of their week on “work about work”.
A lot of people mentioned “Somewhat”, which in a lot of cases means they need to actively protect their focus time and find “spare” hours in their day-to-day.
As expected, challenges with coordination spiral down to employee retention and burnout. In my opinion “not being able to get things done” is one of the biggest factors for changing companies or burning out, right after bad management.
This was very interesting to see, especially the increased costs for customers. In my opinion, a lot of companies don’t share with customers all the insights on what contributed to particular costs.
But price, customer experience and quality in deliverables are very important in order to be competitive in the current market and inefficiencies in the process can contribute to competitive disadvantage.
Root Causes of the Coordination Crisis
That is aligned with my expectations. The more your organization grows, the more important systems are. It’s rarely a problem with people who do hands-on work, but processes, systems, organizational focus and overall structure.
These two quotes come to my mind:
“You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.”
— James Clear
Organizations that design systems are constrained to produce designs that are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.
— Conway’s law
As we mentioned above in the important results section, excessive meetings, slow approvals, lack of training, outdated data and systems contribute to inefficiencies in coordination.
In today’s distributed nature of our work → hybrid/remote work is unavoidable. I don’t know any mid+ size tech company, where all of their people are on-site at the same office at all times.
So it’s a must in my opinion for organizations to support that well.
These two make sense. There are pros and cons when it comes to hybrid/remote (similar to on-site work), but I believe if any of the mid+ size organization wants to be successful, it’s really important to optimize for hybrid/remote work.
AI’s Role In The Crisis and Impacting Careers
The surprise here is the AI-Powered Automation, 35% of organizations seem to have that already to a certain extent.
And also 27~% mentioned Internally Hosted AI Models. What would be interesting to see is: Are these 27% of organizations building their own models or using existing ones - just hosted on their own infrastructure? I am assuming that most do the latter.
Summarizing meeting and preparing notes is a good use case, however, it’s getting a bit daunting when I get into a meeting and I see many AI note-takers present in the meeting.
I think that can spiral to people not being open to sharing things as what you say may get “misquoted” and you may mean a different thing.
There is a lot of positivity in opportunities that AI can bring and make a lot of things easier for us, especially repetitive tasks and automation.
You can read what 11 engineering leaders have shared on how their teams are using AI to increase Software Development productivity here:
A lot of people are a bit unsure whether it will bring benefits or not. But my take on this is:
You can’t use AI as a replacement for a bad process. You need to improve the process first and then add AI to make it better.
Expecting that AI will resolve organizational issues is just the wrong expectation to have.
These are very interesting insights. More than 30% of people have concerns regarding job security and more than 40% of people are concerned about lack of human decision-making in critical areas.
Also, 30% of people mentioned surveillance and micromanagement. I’ve addressed the topic of enforcing AI either being a good thing or a bad thing here:
This is a great sign to see that many people believe that AI will enhance rather than replace their roles and also they are confident in adapting.
And same with this chart → a lot of people are prepared for an AI-driven future, which is the right way to go. It’s important to stay up-to-date with the new things coming and look for how you can improve in this area.
1.2 Cross-Analysis and Insights
Demographic-related questions were also part of the survey, specifically:
Where do you work?
Which of the following best describes your focus within the company?
What is your organization's approach for how you build products?
What primarily drives the company's planning on 'what' to build?
What is the size of your company?
And 3 specific insights emerged when they connected the demographics with the overall survey.
These are the insights provided in the report, so I am quoting them.
Insight 1 - Leaders are more uncertain about the future of their roles than contributors in a world of AI
Leaders are nearly three times more likely than engineers to fear job loss (15.8% vs. 5.6%), suggesting that uncertainty at the top may shape the pace and tone of organizational AI strategies.
Engineers, meanwhile, appear pragmatic and prepared: while only 5.6% fear being replaced, 16.7% anticipate significant changes to their roles and are confident in their ability to adapt.
This is interesting insight and I believe it has to do with different companies adjusting the ratio of managers vs individual contributors. Starting with Amazon, I saw this trend in other companies as well.
One of the key factors I’ve mentioned in the article: Become a great engineering leader in 2025 is to increase your skillset, stay technical and embrace AI as an engineering leader.
Insight 2 - Fully in-office teams spend the most time on coordination
People working entirely in the office are the most likely to say they spend over half their week on tasks like finding information, getting approvals, or switching between tools and teams.
In fact, fully in-office workers report this level of coordination time more than twice the rate of hybrid workers (7.4%).
This has also been very interesting to read as companies who wants people to come work on-site claim that they want to increase collaboration. Funny, this report completely denies such claims of this actually being true.
Insight 3 - Familiarity with AI builds trust, absence breeds confusion
When AI is fully woven into workflows, people are more open to its help with decision-making and action. The more AI is embedded in daily work, the more people trust it to reduce chaos, not create it.
Conversely, fear of AI is highest where it’s absent. 61% of workers at companies with no AI adoption believe it creates more coordination confusion.
This makes sense, as a lot of people are not prone to change and everything that is new and unknown is harder to embrace and it’s harder to believe it will actually improve things.