The best-supported collaboration numbers for 2026: people spend 60% of their time in Microsoft 365 on email, chat and meetings, a quarter of the workweek goes to searching for information, and poor communication costs workers 4.8 hours a week. Below are 40 statistics like these, each linked to the report or study it comes from, with the date its data was collected.
We rebuilt this page in October 2026. The 2023 version listed 40 statistics without sources. Every one of the most-cited figures we traced named the wrong source, misstated what the source found, or had no source we could find, including the “Stanford study” that says teams are 50% more productive. What those studies actually found is further down.
The headline numbers at a glance
If you only need a handful, these are the strongest: recent, large samples, and measured rather than estimated where possible.
| Statistic | Source | Data from |
|---|---|---|
| 60% of time in Microsoft 365 goes to email, chat and meetings | Microsoft Work Trend Index | March 2024, app telemetry |
| A quarter of the workweek is spent searching for information | Atlassian, State of Teams 2025 | 2025 survey, 12,000 workers |
| Poor communication costs workers 4.8 hours a week | Grammarly and The Harris Poll | Sept–Oct 2024 survey |
| 52% of remote-capable US employees work hybrid | Gallup | May 2026 panel survey |
| Hybrid work cut quit rates by a third, with no hit to performance | Bloom, Han and Liang, Nature | 2021–22 randomised trial |
| 20% of employees worldwide are engaged at work | Gallup, State of the Global Workplace | 2025 survey, 263,810 people |
| Bug reports with images got a first reply in about 5.7 hours, vs 9.3 for text | Kuramoto et al., Empirical Software Engineering | 683,810 GitHub issues, 2017–22 |
Teamwork and performance
The classic research on why collaboration matters, stated the way the researchers stated it. Several circulate in a distorted form; “Popular collaboration statistics that don’t hold up” below covers those.
1. Feeling part of a team kept people working 48–64% longer
In five experiments, people who were told they were working on a hard puzzle “together” with others kept at it 48–64% longer than people told they were working alone, and enjoyed it more. Everyone actually worked by themselves; only the framing changed. This is the study behind the “Stanford: teams are 50% more productive” claim, but it measured persistence, not productivity.
Source: Carr and Walton, “Cues of working together fuel intrinsic motivation,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology (2014, Stanford University).
2. Time spent collaborating grew 50% or more over two decades
Rob Cross, Reb Rebele and Adam Grant reported that the time managers and employees spend in collaborative activities had grown by 50% or more over the two decades of data they had collected. The figure comes from the authors’ own data, not a published sample.
Source: Cross, Rebele and Grant, “Collaborative Overload,” Harvard Business Review (January–February 2016).
3. 3–5% of employees supply 20–35% of value-added collaboration
In the same article, network research across more than 300 organizations found that in most cases 20% to 35% of value-added collaborations come from only 3% to 5% of employees. A few people carry much of the load.
Source: Cross, Rebele and Grant, Harvard Business Review (January–February 2016).
4. High-performing organizations are up to 5.5x more likely to reward collaboration
A study of more than 1,100 organizations by the Institute for Corporate Productivity (i4cp), run with Babson professor Rob Cross, found that high performers were up to 5.5 times more likely than low performers to reward individual, team and leader collaboration. It shows an association, not that collaboration causes high performance.
Source: i4cp, “Top Employers are 5.5x More Likely to Reward Collaboration” (June 2017; archived copy, the original page is gone).
5. Decision-makers changed course after team input 66% of the time
Across 566 business decisions made by 184 teams on its platform, Cloverpop found decision-makers changed their minds after team input 66% of the time. For the most diverse teams (gender and geography) the figure was 87%, from a subgroup of 69 decisions. Cloverpop treats a changed mind as a better decision.
Source: Cloverpop, “Hacking Diversity with Inclusive Decision Making” (September 2017; decisions from July 2015 to June 2017).
6. Highly engaged teams have 51% lower turnover
Gallup’s meta-analysis of 183,806 work units found that teams in the top quartile for engagement had 51% lower turnover than bottom-quartile teams in low-turnover organizations, and 21% lower in high-turnover ones.
Source: Gallup, 2024 Q12 Meta-Analysis (11th edition, May 2024; 736 studies, 3.35 million employees).
7. Social tools could raise knowledge workers’ productivity 20–25%, McKinsey estimated
The McKinsey Global Institute estimated that social technologies could raise the productivity of interaction workers (managers and professionals) by 20 to 25 percent, if companies became fully networked. It’s a modelled estimate of potential from 2012, not a measured result.
Source: McKinsey Global Institute, “The social economy” (July 2012).
Where collaboration time goes: meetings, email and chat
Telemetry from Microsoft and survey data from Asana and Atlassian point the same way: communicating about work takes more of the week than the work.
8. 60% of time in Microsoft 365 goes to email, chat and meetings
Microsoft’s app data shows users spend 60% of their time in Microsoft 365 on email, chat and meetings, and 40% in apps for creating work such as Word and PowerPoint. It measures time inside Microsoft 365, not the whole workday.
Source: Microsoft and LinkedIn, 2024 Work Trend Index (May 2024; telemetry for the 28 days to March 2024).
9. The average worker receives 117 emails a day
Most of them get skimmed in under a minute. The count includes mass and automated email.
Source: Microsoft WorkLab, “Breaking down the infinite workday” (June 2025; telemetry to February 2025).
10. 153 Teams messages arrive every weekday
Chat volume per person rose 6% year over year worldwide, and by more than 20% in some regions.
Source: Microsoft WorkLab, “Breaking down the infinite workday” (June 2025; telemetry to February 2025).
11. About 6 in 10 meetings have no calendar invite
For the heaviest meeting users, most meetings are ad hoc calls rather than scheduled ones, and 1 in 10 scheduled meetings is booked at the last minute. Microsoft’s report gives 57% in its text and 60% in its method note.
Source: Microsoft WorkLab, “Breaking down the infinite workday” (June 2025; top 20% of users by meeting volume).
12. Busywork takes 53% of knowledge workers’ time
Knowledge workers say more than half their time goes to chasing the status of work, searching for information and communicating about work. This is a vendor survey, and the hours are self-reported.
Source: Asana, The State of Work Innovation 2024 (survey of 13,066 knowledge workers in six countries, February–August 2024).
13. Unproductive meetings take 5 hours a week, double the 2019 figure
The same survey found hours lost to unproductive meetings had doubled since August 2019, to 5 hours per worker per week.
Source: Asana, The State of Work Innovation 2024 (February–August 2024).
14. 78% say meetings make it hard to get work done
In an Atlassian survey, 78% of knowledge workers said they’re expected to attend so many meetings that it’s hard to get their work done, and 51% said they work overtime at least a few days a week because of it. Atlassian owns Loom, a video messaging tool.
Source: Atlassian, “Workplace Woes: Meetings Edition” (March 2024; 5,000 knowledge workers on four continents).
15. Almost a third of meetings are judged unnecessary
Employees surveyed by Otter.ai and organizational psychologist Steven Rogelberg judged almost a third of their meetings unnecessary. Respondents chose to take part, and Otter.ai sells meeting software.
Source: Otter.ai and Steven Rogelberg, “The Cost of Unnecessary Meeting Attendance” (September 2022; 632 employees, summer 2022).
The cost of unclear communication and missing context
Much of the lost time goes to finding out what someone else already knows.
16. Poor communication costs workers 4.8 hours a week
That is about 12% of the workweek, by workers’ own estimate.
Source: Grammarly and The Harris Poll, “The Productivity Shift” (February 2025; 1,032 knowledge workers and 254 leaders, September–October 2024).
17. That adds up to $9.3 million a year per 1,000 employees
Grammarly multiplies the 4.8 hours by an hourly wage to estimate about $9,284 per employee a year. It’s a model of a hypothetical company, not measured losses.
Source: Grammarly and The Harris Poll, “The Productivity Shift” (February 2025).
18. A quarter of the workweek is spent searching for information
Executives and teams alike say they spend a quarter of their week looking for information they need.
Source: Atlassian, The State of Teams 2025 (March 2025; 12,000 knowledge workers in six countries and 200 Fortune 1000 executives).
19. 56% often have to ask someone or book a meeting to get information
More than half of workers say the only way to get what they need is often to ask a person or schedule a meeting, because it isn’t written down anywhere they can find.
Source: Atlassian, The State of Teams 2025 (March 2025).
20. 71% find other teams working on duplicate projects
Seven in ten knowledge workers have found another team working on the same project or initiative as theirs.
Source: Atlassian, The State of Teams 2026 (April 2026; 12,035 knowledge workers, January–February 2026).
21. Atlassian puts the cost of fragmented work at $161 billion a year
Its estimate for the Fortune 500 counts duplicated work, misaligned priorities and coordination friction. Atlassian calls it the “fragmentation tax.” The model is described in one line, so treat the figure as an order of magnitude.
Source: Atlassian, The State of Teams 2026 (April 2026).
22. 47% of digital workers struggle to find the information they need
Gartner found nearly half of digital workers struggle to find the information or data they need to do their jobs well. The survey ran in late 2022.
Source: Gartner press release (May 2023; 4,861 employees in the US, UK, India and China, September–November 2022).
Interruptions, context switching and focus
23. Heavy Microsoft 365 users are interrupted every 2 minutes
Among the 20% of users who receive the most pings, a meeting, email or chat arrives every 2 minutes on average across an 8-hour day. A ping is anything incoming, whether or not the person acted on it.
Source: Microsoft WorkLab, “Breaking down the infinite workday” (June 2025; telemetry to February 2025).
24. Half of employees say their work feels chaotic and fragmented
48% of employees and 52% of leaders said so in Microsoft’s 2025 survey.
Source: Microsoft, 2025 Work Trend Index (April 2025; 31,000 workers in 31 markets, February–March 2025).
25. Workers switch between apps and websites about 1,200 times a day
In a study of 137 people at three Fortune 500 companies, the average person toggled between apps nearly 1,200 times a day. At about two seconds to reorient each time, that’s just under 4 hours a week. The sample was small and mostly back-office roles.
Source: Murty, Dadlani and Das, Harvard Business Review (August 2022).
26. 65% say replying fast matters more than progress on priorities
Nearly two in three knowledge workers told Atlassian it’s more important to respond quickly to messages than to move their top priorities forward.
Source: Atlassian, The State of Teams 2024 (June 2024; 5,000 knowledge workers).
27. Interrupted work took 25 minutes 26 seconds to resume
When information workers came back to an interrupted task the same day, it took them 25 minutes and 26 seconds on average. The often-quoted “23 minutes 15 seconds” is not in this paper.
Source: Mark, González and Harris, “No Task Left Behind?”, ACM CHI (2005; 24 workers shadowed for 700+ hours).
28. People focus on one screen for a median of 40 seconds
Computer logs of 40 information workers showed a median of 40 seconds on any one screen before switching.
Source: Mark et al., “Neurotics Can’t Focus,” ACM CHI (2016).
Remote and hybrid collaboration
29. 52% of remote-capable US employees work hybrid
As of May 2026, 26% work fully remote and 22% fully on-site. The base is employees whose jobs can be done remotely, not all workers.
Source: Gallup, Indicator: Hybrid Work (updated September 2026; probability panel, May 2026).
30. About 26% of US paid workdays are worked from home
Full days worked from home made up about a quarter of paid workdays in September 2026. Over the past year, 26% of full-time employees were hybrid, 12% fully remote and 62% fully on-site.
Source: WFH Research (Barrero, Bloom, Buckman and Davis), SWAA October 2026 update (October 2026; monthly survey of US workers aged 20–64).
31. 35% of employed Americans did some work at home on days they worked
Among people with a bachelor’s degree or higher, the share was 51%; among those with only a high school diploma, 19%.
Source: US Bureau of Labor Statistics, American Time Use Survey (June 2026; 2025 data).
32. Hybrid work cut quit rates by a third, with no effect on performance
In a randomized trial with 1,612 employees at Trip.com, two work-from-home days a week cut quits by a third. Performance reviews over the next two years showed no difference. One company, in one country.
Source: Bloom, Han and Liang, “Hybrid working from home improves retention without damaging performance,” Nature (June 2024).
33. Remote work cut cross-team collaboration time by about 25%
When Microsoft moved its US staff to remote work in 2020, the share of collaboration time people spent with other groups fell by about a quarter, and communication became more asynchronous. The data covers 61,182 employees under pandemic conditions.
Source: Yang et al., “The effects of remote work on collaboration among information workers,” Nature Human Behaviour (September 2021; 2020 data).
34. 20% of employees worldwide are engaged at work
Global engagement fell from a 2022 peak of 23%. Gallup estimates low engagement cost the world economy about $10 trillion in 2025, or 9% of GDP. That cost is a model, not measured output.
Source: Gallup, State of the Global Workplace 2026 (April 2026; 263,810 respondents in 160+ countries, 2025).
Collaboration tools
35. Nearly 80% of workers used collaboration tools in 2021, up from about half in 2019
Gartner measured a 44% rise in workers’ use of collaboration tools between 2019 and 2021.
Source: Gartner press release (August 2021; 10,080 employees, November–December 2020).
36. Only 23% of digital workers are completely satisfied with their work apps
That’s down from 30% in 2022. Satisfied workers were nearly three times as likely to say they were much more productive.
Source: Gartner press release (March 2025; 5,141 employees, April–July 2024).
37. The average organization manages 305 SaaS apps
The median is 240, and the count was flat year over year. The data comes from a vendor whose customers skew toward large enterprises.
Source: Zylo, 2026 SaaS Management Index (January 2026; platform data).
Visual and video communication
Research on visuals at work is thinner than the infographics suggest. These are the findings that hold up; the most-shared claims are covered in the myths section below.
38. Bug reports with images got a first reply nearly 40% sooner
Across 683,810 GitHub issues, reports with images got a first comment after a median of about 5.7 hours, against 9.3 hours for text-only reports. The share of issues with visuals rose from 14.9% in 2017 to 27.4% in 2021. The data is correlational, and reports with video took longer to close.
Source: Kuramoto et al., “Understanding the characteristics and the role of visual issue reports,” Empirical Software Engineering (June 2024).
39. Adding video to teaching produced a strong learning gain
A meta-analysis of 105 randomized trials with 7,776 students found that adding video to existing teaching had a strong effect on learning (g = 0.80), while swapping video in for existing methods had a small one (g = 0.28). The studies were in higher education, not workplaces.
Source: Noetel et al., “Video Improves Learning in Higher Education,” Review of Educational Research (2021).
40. 83% prefer video for instructional content at work
In TechSmith’s survey of people who had watched a work video in the past month, 83% said they prefer watching video for instructional or informational content. Respondents could choose more than one format, so this isn’t video over text. TechSmith sells video tools.
Source: TechSmith, Video Viewer Study 2024 (September 2024; 929 respondents in six countries, May 2024).
Popular collaboration statistics that don’t hold up
These numbers are widely quoted, often with a link to the earlier version of this page. Here is what the research behind them actually says.
“Teams that work well together are 50% more productive” (Stanford)
The source is a set of five 2014 experiments by Priyanka Carr and Gregory Walton (Journal of Experimental Social Psychology). People who were told they were working “together” persisted 48–64% longer on a hard puzzle. Nobody worked on a team, and nobody measured productivity. See statistic 1.
“Teams make better decisions 87% of the time” (Harvard Business Review)
The figure comes from a 2017 Cloverpop white paper, not HBR. The rate for all teams was 66%; 87% applies to a subgroup of 69 decisions by the most diverse teams. And “better” meant the decision-maker changed their mind after hearing the team. See statistic 5.
“Collaborative teams are 5 times more likely to be high-performing”
i4cp’s 2017 study found the reverse: high-performing organizations were up to 5.5 times more likely to reward collaboration. It’s variously credited to Stanford and Deloitte, and came from neither. See statistic 4.
Collaboration statistics with no traceable source
For each of these we found no report or study containing the figure as quoted. Where something close exists, the last column says what it is.
| The claim | Usually credited to | What we found |
|---|---|---|
| Collaborative project tools raise project success rates by 71% | PMI | PMI’s 2016 Pulse of the Profession: organizations that value project management report 71% of projects meeting their goals, vs 52%. It’s about culture, not tools |
| Companies that foster teamwork have 50% lower turnover | Gallup | Gallup measured engagement, not teamwork: 51% lower turnover for top-quartile teams in low-turnover organizations (statistic 6) |
| Diverse teams are 45% more creative problem solvers | Boston Consulting Group | A 2013 Center for Talent Innovation survey: employees at firms with diverse leaders were 45% likelier to report market-share growth |
| 43% of IT leaders say collaboration tools are a security risk | Insight Partners | No source. The only other copy we found cites this page. In Mimecast’s 2023 survey, 75% of IT decision-makers said tools like Teams and Slack create new security loopholes |
| 90% of remote workers rely on video conferencing | Buffer | Not in Buffer’s reports. Pew Research, October 2020: 81% of people working from home most of the time used video calling |
| Communication tools raise remote worker satisfaction by 80% | Owl Labs | Not in any Owl Labs report we could check |
| Efficient collaboration saves 50 minutes a day | McKinsey | No McKinsey source found |
| Good team communication lifts customer satisfaction by 50% | McKinsey | No source found |
| Collaborative decision-making increases innovation by 50% | Deloitte | No Deloitte source found |
| A collaborative culture makes companies 20% more likely to retain staff | Deloitte | No Deloitte source found |
Where the closest real figures come from
PMI, Pulse of the Profession 2016; Hewlett, Marshall and Sherbin, Harvard Business Review, December 2013; Mimecast, State of Email Security 2023; Pew Research Center, December 2020.
Visual communication myths to stop quoting
Visual communication has its own famous numbers with no research behind them. Here is where each one comes from.
| The claim | Where it comes from |
|---|---|
| People process visuals 60,000 times faster than text | A 1990s 3M presentation brochure that cites only “behavioral research,” and a 1982 Business Week advertising insert before that. No study reports such a ratio |
| 90% of information sent to the brain is visual | No traceable source. It appears in Eric Jensen’s book Brain-Based Learning, and the source it cites couldn’t be found |
| 65% of people are visual learners | No traceable study, and controlled research has found no evidence that teaching to a “learning style” improves learning |
| 93% of communication is non-verbal | Albert Mehrabian’s 1960s experiments on how people convey feelings. He says the ratio doesn’t apply to other communication |
| We remember 10% of what we read and 90% of what we do | Edgar Dale’s “Cone of Experience” had no percentages. They were added in 1967 by an oil company employee, without research |
| Attention spans are now 8 seconds, shorter than a goldfish’s | The BBC traced it through a 2015 Microsoft Canada report to a website with no clear source, and found no evidence that attention spans are shrinking |
What the research does show
The real findings are narrower. People can pick out the meaning of a picture shown for as little as 13 milliseconds (Potter et al., 2014), but that study made no comparison with text. For the rest, see Pashler et al., 2008 on learning styles, Jon Schwabish’s investigation of the 60,000 figure, Mehrabian’s own note and the BBC on the goldfish.
What these numbers mean for how your team works
Read together, the strongest numbers point at one problem: the gap between the person who knows something and the person who needs it. People search for it (statistic 18), ask or book a meeting to get it (19), and get interrupted in between (23).
Three habits close some of that gap. Write down or record the answer once, where the next person will find it. Send a short update instead of booking a status meeting. And when you need context from someone, ask them to show you rather than describe it. Our guide to effective collaboration and remote team practices go into more detail.
That is the job Zight does. Record your screen or grab an annotated screenshot and share it as a link, so a two-minute explanation replaces a meeting. With request links, you can ask a customer or a teammate to record their screen for you, with no account or install on their end. See how teams use it for async communication and for cutting meetings.
How we chose these statistics
- Every figure comes from the publisher’s own report, press release or dataset, or from a peer-reviewed paper. We didn’t take numbers from other statistics roundups.
- For reports that come out every year, we used the latest edition that includes the figure.
- Each statistic says when its data was collected and how, and flags vendor surveys and small samples.
- Where a publisher’s page has moved or blocks access, we link an archived copy of the publisher’s own page.
- Every figure was checked against its source on October 7, 2026.
Frequently asked questions
Is it true that teams that work well together are 50% more productive?
Not as stated. The figure traces to a 2014 Stanford study by Carr and Walton, in which people told they were working “together” persisted 48–64% longer on a hard puzzle than people told they were working alone. Everyone worked by themselves, and productivity wasn’t measured.
How much time do employees spend on meetings, email and chat?
Microsoft’s telemetry shows people spend 60% of their time in Microsoft 365 on email, chat and meetings (2024), and the average worker receives 117 emails and 153 Teams messages a day (2025). In Asana’s 2024 survey, workers said unproductive meetings alone take 5 hours a week.
How much does poor communication cost a business?
In a 2025 Grammarly and Harris Poll survey, workers estimated poor communication costs them 4.8 hours a week. Grammarly models that at about $9.3 million a year for a company of 1,000 employees. Atlassian estimates fragmented work costs the Fortune 500 $161 billion a year.
How many employees work hybrid or remotely?
Gallup’s May 2026 data shows 52% of US employees with remote-capable jobs work hybrid, 26% fully remote and 22% on-site. Across all workers, the Bureau of Labor Statistics found 35% did some or all of their work at home on days they worked in 2025.
Can I cite these statistics?
Yes. Cite the original source linked beside each number, with its date, so readers can check it. If this page helped you find them, a link back is welcome.