The modern workplace is drowning in its own connectivity.
Though knowledge workers are more digitally linked than ever, they’re increasingly detached from productive workflows and authentic team collaboration.
We conducted a team communication survey to identify the key trends shaping workplace communication in 2025. Our research uncovers how communication overload—from inbox saturation to the cognitive cost of constant app switching—silently erodes productivity.
Always Connected, Never in Sync: The State of Workplace Communication
⏰ 60-Second Summary
The workplace communication gap is real.
Our data shows that nearly 40% of professionals feel compelled to follow up on action items immediately after every meeting. However, with current communication channels split between email (42%) and instant messaging (41%), these action items are often scattered across the workplace.
Here’s another concerning industry statistic to put these findings in context: Over 60% of a team’s time is spent searching for context, information, and action items.
⚠️ This exposes a deeper systemic issue: Work is broken.
Knowledge workers are forced to compensate for this by creating personal workarounds, leading to hidden time costs and potential misalignment.
This underpins the theme of our research. As we investigate and identify communication gaps, we’ll touch on key trends reshaping the modern workplace and their toll on knowledge workers.
Our data reveals three central themes:
1️⃣ Fragmented internal communication landscape: Teams lose precious hours jumping between different tools, creating scattered information pockets across multiple disconnected platforms
2️⃣ Cognitive overload from overcommunication: The constant barrage of messages and notifications forces workers to repeatedly shift focus, leading to reduced focus and potential burnout
3️⃣ Inefficient information retrieval and action tracking: Key decisions and tasks get buried in endless chat threads, causing redundant work, miscommunication, and missed deadlines
Survey methodology and demographics
ClickInsights surveys thousands of knowledge workers and productivity enthusiasts every month to bring you the latest trends in the global workplace.
Our research delves into how professionals manage their time, navigate workplace demands, and implement productivity strategies. By analyzing responses from participants worldwide, we seek to uncover universal productivity challenges and patterns, helping organizations and individuals make more informed decisions in their daily work lives.
5 Hidden Costs of Digital Communication Overload
Communication gaps don’t just impact productivity—they reshape how teams function.
Our study reveals five critical challenges facing modern teams and provides practical solutions that can transform how your teams collaborate and drive results.
1. The messaging myth: more isn’t always better
📮ClickInsight: Knowledge workers spend an average of 25 messages daily searching for information, with nearly 1 in 5 employees sending over 50 messages.
Daily message volume can vary drastically across teams, with 20% of team members sending as many as 50 messages daily to locate essential information.
Our survey results reveal a broad spectrum of messaging patterns, highlighting the inefficiency of current information-retrieval methods:
- 43.28% of employees are low-volume communicators, sending fewer than 10 messages
- 19.4% of workers are high-volume communicators, sending over 50 messages
- 37.32% of professionals send a moderate number of messages, between 11 and 20
- A smaller group of 14.18% of teams averages 21-30 messages per day
Key takeaways
📌 Disparate messaging patterns indicate inconsistent access to information across an organization
📌 High message volumes suggest inefficient information retrieval, information sharing, updates and announcements, and task follow-ups that could be streamlined
📌 Unified communication strategies can help reduce unnecessary message volume by making documents, data, and context accessible in one place
2. When quick replies kill productivity: a checkpoint
📮ClickInsight: 60% of workers respond to instant messages within 10 minutes, but each interruption costs up to 23 minutes of focus time, creating a productivity paradox.
While quick responses keep work moving, the hidden cost of constant interruptions takes away from focus and efficiency.
Workers lose a whopping 23 minutes of focus time after each interruption.
This underpins the need for more intelligent communication solutions that preserve both responsiveness and concentration. We found that:
- Over 60% of workers are swift communicators, responding within 10 minutes
- 15% of workers take several hours to respond
- While another 15% are slow responders, taking over 8 hours
If rapid response is a key attribute of your company culture, it’s time to consider an outcomes-based approach tied to clear goals and KPIs.
Key takeaways
📌 Rapid response culture creates continuous productivity disruptions throughout the workday
📌 Focus recovery time significantly exceeds the actual time spent on message responses
📌 Centralized communication features like integrated chat allow professionals to maintain relevant context while reducing disruptive platform switches, contributing to improved employee satisfaction at an organizational level
3. Lost in the silo: reclaiming productivity
📮ClickInsight: 83% of knowledge workers rely primarily on email and chat for team communication, scattering vital information across disconnected channels and limiting effective collaboration.
Teams lose more than half their workday to tool switching and information hunting, while communication remains fragmented.
This fragmentation, involving scattered messages across multiple channels, hinders productivity and innovation. Our data underscores the severity of this issue:
- 42.08% of teams still rely heavily on email for communication despite its siloed nature
- 40.83% of teams use instant messaging as their primary channel, but the medium often lacks the structure and organization needed for complex projects
- 17.1% prefer a combination of voice calls, video calls, and project management tools to get the information they need
Key takeaways
📌 A fragmented communication landscape is a significant productivity barrier, as teams must divide their time between email, instant messaging, and calls
📌 Traditional communication methods continue to dominate workplace interactions, often creating silos instead of alignment
📌 A centralized platform addresses these challenges by integrating project management, collaboration, and communication
4. Overcommunicating vs. hyperconnection: drawing the line
📮ClickInsight: 17% of knowledge workers are “super-connectors,” managing 15+ daily workplace relationships, while most maintain close to 6 core connections on average.
Knowledge workers face overwhelming collaboration demands, with many managing 15+ daily workplace connections.
Navigating multiple relationships and conversations simultaneously at work makes managing context and maintaining productive workflows much more difficult. This constant drain on attention leads to increased cognitive load and even burnout in the long run.
Here’s what we found:
- One-third of people work closely with just 1-3 colleagues daily
- 1 in 5 team members manage 4-6 daily workplace relationships
- 17% are super-connectors, coordinating with 15+ teammates every day
Key takeaways
📌 High communication volume creates a significant cognitive burden as workers manage multiple conversations simultaneously
📌 Context-switching costs multiply as workers navigate between conversations and threads across multiple tools
📌 Intelligent workspace solutions like integrated search, centralized documentation, and an AI knowledge manager can help maintain context, reduce cognitive overload, and boost overall employee engagement
5. From chat to task: closing the gap
📮ClickInsight: Approximately 93% of knowledge workers are at risk of losing important decisions due to scattered documentation, with just 8% using project management tools to track action items.
There’s a massive gap between discussion and action, which creates significant inefficiencies in how teams track and execute work.
We found that most teams either spend valuable time manually documenting action items or risk losing important decisions between chat, email, and other tools.
- Nearly 40% of professionals manually track actions, a time-consuming and error-prone process
- 14.2% of respondents do not feel the need to track action items
- Over 36.44% of knowledge workers rely on inconsistent tracking methods, leading to potential miscommunication and missed deadlines
- Only 7.75% utilize project management tools for tracking action items
Key takeaways
📌 Manual conversion processes create redundant work and increase the risk of missed action items
📌 Inconsistent tracking methods lead to lost information and reduced accountability
📌 Unified workspace tools with built-in conversation-to-task tools eliminate duplicate work by enabling instant action items from conversation threads
Our 4 Strategic Recommendations
If each interruption cuts our focus time by 23 minutes, the drain on any given workday is massive.
As we’ve seen, the primary workplace communication challenges include a lack of context, redundant follow-ups, and cognitive overload resulting from multiple tools.
Organizations need an actionable strategy to bridge these communication gaps effectively. Here are four strategic recommendations based on our survey insights to help your organization achieve and sustain world-class productivity:
✅ Fix chat and messaging
Communication is often siloed and separate from actual workflows. Integrate messaging into your workflows.
✅ Bring AI in
Eliminate repetitive tasks like follow-ups, creating summaries, and assigning action items using automation and built-in AI assistants.
✅ Make context instantly available
Invest in AI-powered knowledge workflows and powerful workspace search features that unite docs, tasks, and people.
✅ Leverage built-in accountability
Create workflows that assign ownership from the get-go so you never miss a task or action item.
How Can Help?
Let’s face it. Work is broken.
Our projects, documentation, and communication are scattered across disconnected tools that drain productivity.
That’s why , the everything app, for work, combines AI project management, knowledge management, and chat—all powered by AI, helping you work faster and smarter.
Here are three ways helps you break down siloes within team communication:
🏁 Smart conversations
Ask Brain to summarize chats, draft new responses, and catch up on updates from comment threads.
AI also powers ’s Connected Search, seamlessly connecting knowledge with your workflows. Your tasks, docs, chats, and people are now linked in one place.
🏁 Easy integrations
A fan of email or Slack?
Leverage ’s 1000+ integrations to connect to your preferred tools and convert emails and messages into trackable tasks with a single click. Now, all your workflows are united and seamlessly syncing across tools.
🏁 Instant context
With Chat, work and chat are connected.
DM your colleagues, link chat threads to specific tasks, run audio and video calls, and create action items right from your conversations using ’s integrated chat. No context is ever lost.
Next steps
Ready to close the communication gap, step into the future of work, and maximize productivity? Join over 3 million teams that use to boost their productivity. Sign up for free today.
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