Coordination Work is Stealing From Your Business. Make It Stop.

According to a recent Accenture Institute for High Performance report, nearly 1,800 management-level professionals globally reported that 54% of their time is spent on “administrative coordination and control tasks, such as scheduling, resource allocation and reporting.” Translated, over half of every single workday is consumed with emailing, checking-in, following-up, and compiling and reviewing data/results: four hours and 20 minutes for every eight-hour day! That is a ridiculous waste of time and money. And, it’s totally fixable.

You probably don’t need us to tell you what the financial implications are (we will later anyway). Or, to calculate the opportunity cost of the time that could be used for all those activities that actually contribute to growth. There is no reason why any employee, particularly senior leadership, should not be liberated from bureaucratic responsibilities — especially since those duties can be automated with AI.

In the same study, “86% [of those surveyed] … said that they would like AI support with monitoring and reporting. What’s more, 45% … would automate such tasks, if possible.” Think about how much time that would free up… and then do the math. Recognition is growing about the impact of the amount of time spent on coordination that adds little/no value to your organization’s success. This is clearly not the most advantageous way to use valuable and limited resources.

Coordination Costs a Lot.

According to Harvard Business Review, “the cost of excess bureaucracy in the U.S. economy amounts to more than $3 trillion lost in economic output, or about 17% of GDP.” Since so much of a manager’s time today is on administrative coordination, their work may not be showing real results or, even worse, be causing real harm to your organization’s fiscal health. Business leaders need to liberate their managers from the weight of this burden.

Time is just as precious and valuable commodity as money. Those four hours and 20 minutes that are lost every single day amount to significant missed opportunities in terms of what could be achieved otherwise. Managers across seniority levels and career stages all share a common attitude according to the Accenture study: they would use their newfound free time, after adopting AI, accepting new responsibilities, experimenting, collaborating, coaching and building relationships with direct reports, spending more time on existing tasks and improving work-life balance.

If the leadership across your organization was able to spend half their day on these things, the outcomes could be substantial. And, the positive results for your business enormous. Experimentation leads to workplace innovation, fresh ideas, processes or products and it could be your company’s next big break.

Enter Intelligent Automation.

Much of this coordination and control work can be automated and, more importantly, done successfully with AI. Provide your managers with a tool to intelligently automate the routine tasks that are now such a large part of their days. Free them to create the real value they were initially hired to provide.

Tonkean’s AI-powered coordination platform smartly automates and streamlines that coordination work. It takes the chore of checking in, following up, chasing down, and tracking key metrics off your shoulders, and keeps your team focused and accountable. The platform connects to all of the business tools you already use to automatically and dynamically compile the critical data you need to heighten visibility, and the AI Bot monitors those KPIs, engaging your team when it discovers indicators that require context.

AI ensures that Tonkean learns your business so these administrative functions seamlessly adapt to your processes and workflows.

One of the most pressing problems today in business is that of management spending too much time and money on administrative coordination and control. These functions waste valuable resources and risk real damage. And, the rub, humans aren’t really even needed to accomplish them. There is clearly a real willingness today to automate coordination with AI and, with Tonkean, there’s a real solution to accomplish it. Get that 54% of your managers’ time back, and transform them from managers into leaders.

Tonkean will save your organization resources by aggregating status updates from your teams and calculating key metrics in your dashboard. It facilitates increased productivity by helping your teams spend less time on “the work about work,” and more time on real work.