Australian workplaces rank high for wasted time
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Multiple tools and systems, fragmented AI, and time spent reconciling conflicts are seeing the nation’s employees lose almost a day a week of productivity as organisations rush to implement AI.
Latest statistics tell a story of a disjointed technological landscape.
Recent Workday research has found that administration continues to weigh down employees, with 30 per cent of workers spending more than seven hours per week on copying information between different applications, reconciling conflicting data, and manually feeding context into tools.
Further, 75 per cent of surveyed ANZ workers find administrative tasks create sustained friction, with more than 60 per cent spending at least half their effort in data translation and coordination.
The research also pointed to a flow-on effect, whereby decisions can be delayed by missing, incomplete, or contradictory information, sometimes causing team disagreements or further issues to resolve.
Over 6,000 professionals, including HR, IT, and operations, were surveyed earlier this year by The Harris Poll on behalf of Workday to locate which AI strategies are working and which are not.
The report, titled The Copy/Paste Economy: Why Task-Oriented AI Is Failing the Enterprise, suggested that any AI-assisted productivity gains are being offset by the time spent on manual or repetitive tasks.
In what appears to be congruent findings, only one-third of ANZ employees reported AI embedded into core workflows, pointing to integrated AI platforms as the solution.
According to Workday ANZ vice president and managing director Jo-Anne Ruhl, “too many employees are serving as the human middleware between disconnected systems”.
“The companies seeing the most value from AI are building it directly into the systems where their people, data, and work come together,” Ruhl said.
In this vein, recent coverage of the vanishing of AI benefits revealed that these productivity gains have only raised expectations, actually growing employee workloads and demands. In this way, the challenge for organisations has been creating an AI workforce design that addresses expected outputs while boosting the employee experience.
As explained by a director+ in IT, “dealing with system glitches, chasing approvals and constantly fixing or redoing work because of inconsistent data - it keeps me busy, but doesn’t feel like real progress”.
Similarly, a director+ in construction explained: “My day often feels busy but not genuinely productive when I’m pulled into constant coordination tasks and system-related issues that interrupt focused, high-value work.”
Another director+ from IT added: “A significant portion of the day is lost in meetings where the adoption of AI is discussed, but the discussion consistently revolves [around] simplistic justifications rather than practical choices.”
In comparison to disconnected, standalone systems, the prioritisation of AI integration has moved the responsibility of administrative burden onto AI, empowering employees and freeing time to establish meaningful, measurable business outcomes.
Workday also established that more than 90 per cent of employees agree that AI can increase their decisional confidence when they are able to trust underlying systems.
The findings highlight that organisations and leaders need to first shift their understanding of AI from a high-tech fix to a facilitator of productivity when done right.
RELATED TERMS
An employee is a person who has signed a contract with a company to provide services in exchange for pay or benefits. Employees vary from other employees like contractors in that their employer has the legal authority to set their working conditions, hours, and working practises.
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