The Coordination Tax at Work

Most managers know the feeling: the strategy is clear, the goals have been announced, and people understand what they are supposed to accomplish. Yet the work still moves at half speed.

A decision waits for three approvals. Two departments build separate versions of the same report. A project meeting ends with no named owner. Employees spend Friday afternoon preparing status updates about work they could have finished if they had not been preparing status updates.

This is the coordination tax: the time, attention, and money lost while people organize work instead of completing it. The term gained renewed attention this past week after new workplace research highlighted the gap between understanding company priorities and being able to act on them. In that study, 83 percent of workers said they understood how their roles connected to business goals, but only 51 percent believed their organizations arranged work effectively around those priorities.