Atlassian 2025: The 25% Time Tax of Enterprise Information Search
A data-led look at how knowledge teams lose execution velocity when information is scattered, and what high-performing teams do differently.
Atlassian State of Teams 2025 with supporting references
A quarter of work time is still disappearing into search
Atlassian's State of Teams 2025 frames a direct productivity loss: teams and leaders spend roughly 25% of their workweek searching for answers. In the Fortune 500 framing used in the report, this compounds into billions of lost hours each year.
This is not a niche coordination issue. It is an operating-model defect where information remains fragmented across documents, messages, and disconnected tools. When teams cannot find context quickly, every decision cycle slows down.
Search-friction signals from State of Teams 2025
25%
Workweek lost to information search
2.4B
Estimated annual hours lost (Fortune 500)
56%
Workers saying they must ask someone/book meetings
71%
Teams not maximizing AI for finding information
How the friction appears in day-to-day operations
The report's bottlenecks are practical and recurring: repeated status synchronization, waiting on colleagues for basic context, and duplicated effort caused by low project visibility.
These patterns create a hidden tax across product, operations, and go-to-market teams. People spend more time reconciling understanding than moving work forward.
Operational blockers reported in the study
Waiting on others for required information
55%
Only way to get information is ask/meeting
56%
Could work faster with easier information findability
43%
Cross-functional collaboration more crucial than ever
93%
What high-performing teams do differently
Atlassian's strongest finding is structural: successful teams adopt a connected system of work, with clear goals, shared process, and centralized visibility into work and decisions.
AI helps only when information is already connected and searchable. In fragmented systems, AI amplifies confusion; in connected systems, AI amplifies execution speed.
Sources and citations
Primary report and statistics.
Executive summary framing and key percentages.
Secondary corroboration for mainstream coverage.