The Real Cost of Bad Decisions in Teams

Only 20% of organizations say they excel at decision making.

61% of executives say that at least half the time they spend making decisions is ineffective.

There is a 95% correlation between companies that excel at decision making and those with top-tier financial results.

Companies that excel at decision effectiveness generate returns more than 4x their peers and grow profits at 5.5x the rate of their peers.

65% of decisions today are more complex than they were just 2 years ago, involving more stakeholders and more choices.

Diverse and inclusive teams make better business decisions 87% of the time.

Teams outperform individual decision makers 66% of the time. Gender-diverse teams make better decisions 73% of the time.

Projects where leadership makes decisions in less than 1 hour have a 58% success rate. When decision-making takes 5+ hours, the success rate drops to 18%.

68% of employees say they struggle with the pace and volume of work, and 46% report burnout.

48% of employees and 52% of leaders say their work feels chaotic and fragmented.

43% of meetings could be eliminated with no real adverse consequences.

More than 2 hours per day in meetings is the tipping point at which a majority of workers feel overburdened.

Employees who feel obligated to work after-hours register 20% lower productivity scores than those who log off at the end of the workday.

Meetings after 8 PM are up 16% year over year, and 30% of meetings now span multiple time zones.

64% of workers say they don't have the time and energy to do their job well. Those people are 3.5x more likely to struggle with innovation.

Executives spend nearly 40% of their working time making decisions. Most of them believe that time is poorly used.

Inefficient decision making costs a typical Fortune 500 company 530,000 days of managers' time per year. That's roughly $250 million in wasted wages.

Only 39% of companies have a strong cultural orientation to data-driven decision making. Those with the strongest analytics cultures are 2x more likely to have significantly exceeded business goals.

77% of business leaders believe that business acumen facilitates strategic decision-making during project execution.

Poor operational decisions by managers cost firms upward of 3% of profits.

CEOs see roughly 40% of time spent on routine activities (decision meetings, emails) as inefficient.

U.S. businesses lose an estimated $1.2 trillion annually to poor workplace communication. That's $12,506 per employee, every year.

100% of knowledge workers experience miscommunication at least weekly. 1 in 4 experience it multiple times a day.

Global employee disengagement costs the world economy $8.9 trillion in lost productivity. That's 9% of global GDP.

Only 21% of employees globally are engaged at work. 62% are 'not engaged' and 15% are 'actively disengaged'.

12% of all projects are rated as failures and 40% produce mixed results. Organizations that undervalue project management see 67% more project failures.

Knowledge workers spend 58% of their time on 'work about work': chasing updates, sitting in unnecessary meetings, switching between tools. Only 33% goes to actual skilled work.

Executives are 30% more likely to miss deadlines than average workers. The reason? Too many video calls and meetings.

Managers account for 70% of the variance in team engagement scores.

Only 31% of U.S. employees are engaged at work, a 10-year low. Manager engagement dropped to just 27%.

Knowledge workers spend 28% of the workweek managing email and nearly 20% searching for internal information or tracking down colleagues.

Knowledge workers spend about 30% of their time, roughly 2.5 hours per day, just searching for information.

Knowledge workers spend 103 hours per year in unnecessary meetings, 209 hours per year on duplicated work, and 352 hours per year talking about work instead of doing it.

Employees need 19.6 hours per week of focus time to be productive but only get 10.6 hours. The number one cause of burnout is lack of focus time, impacting 63.4% of employees.