As global leaders warn that stagnant productivity levels are a growing problem, many workers may wonder why these alarm bells feel all too familiar.

The reason is simple. Despite working more hours than ever before, we’re getting less done. In Australia, for example, labor productivity – the amount of goods and services produced per hour worked – is languishing at 2016 levels. This trend is mirrored globally, with economic growth remaining static, holding at 3.3 percent in both 2024 and 2025, following 3.4 percent in 2022.

Behind these figures lies a workplace problem that helps explain this productivity paradox. Recent Miro data shows that for every one hour knowledge workers spend on strategic, high-impact work, they lose over three hours on ‘maintenance work’ – the repetitive operational tasks that keep organizations ticking along but rarely move them forward. I call it ‘busywork’.

As more of the workday is consumed by coordination, administration and internal friction, productivity stalls even as total hours rise. The economy grows wider, not smarter.

Banishing busywork

Beyond the billions of dollars busywork costs businesses each year, it also has broader implications on wages, inflation and our ability to innovate.

When workers spend more time on processes than on output, there’s less surplus to share, which explains why wages have struggled to keep pace with the cost of living, even in periods of strong employment. Busywork also inhibits innovation, leaving organizations slow to adapt and scale.

Human costs only compound the problem. Persistent low-value work fuels burnout and disengagement, increases turnover and drains institutional knowledge. And if employees continue to work longer but produce less per hour, no amount of extra labor will reverse the trend.

So, what’s really behind busywork? Workers point to two internal culprits: misalignment and outdated systems.

Fragmented tech platforms have become a major source of noise. Information lives in too many places, teams use different tools for the same tasks and work is constantly repeated because context gets lost. At the same time, clarity has become a moving target. Priorities shift, expectations change and stakeholders fall out of sync, pushing teams into more meetings to make sense of the chaos. The result is often more time talking about work than actually doing it.

Attempts to fix these problems often make them worse. Organizational psychologist Professor Bob Sutton describes this as “addition sickness”: the instinct to respond to complexity by adding more tools, policies and processes. Instead of restoring order, these additions create more friction, slow decision-making and raise the cost of doing business. The result is burnout, stalled innovation and delayed projects.

But workers see a way out. It lies in a more intentional approach to how we work and how we use technology, particularly AI. More than half of workers globally believe AI can reduce repetitive admin, eliminate rework across tools and help break down collaboration silos.

But AI’s real value won’t come from acting as a personal assistant. The real opportunity is team-level AI: systems that understand shared context and help teams move faster together. Imagine AI that captures decisions as they’re made, automatically keeps plans and roadmaps aligned, flags misalignment early and connects information across tools so work doesn’t need to be recreated.

Redesigning workflow

Technology alone, however, isn’t enough. Organizations must also redesign how teams collaborate, replacing siloed tools with shared, visible plans, reducing unnecessary meetings in favor of asynchronous work and modernizing the tool stack with integrated platforms built for today’s pace and complexity.

At the center of all of this is alignment. When teams know what matters and what doesn’t, why it matters and how their work connects, busywork naturally falls away. Productivity improves, burnout eases and momentum returns.

Busywork isn’t inevitable. It’s a signal that the way we work hasn’t kept up with the demands of modern business. If organizations want to lift productivity, reduce burnout and boost innovation, they need to redesign work for momentum – not by doing more, but by creating the conditions where people can do better.

Opinions expressed by The CEO Magazine contributors are their own.