The cost of shiftless employees: When half the workforce is only giving the bare minimum

We’ve all worked with people who don’t pull their weight. But it’s worse than you might have thought: According to fresh research, most employees — while physically showing up, as they must in an RTO-driven world — are checked out mentally.

And it’s costing employers a sum that would make even Elon Musk blush.

According to Axios HQ’s report “2025 State of Internal Comms,” employees say they’re spending just 66% of their day doing their actual job, with the remainder lost to endless distractions, avoidable meetings — and the biggie, bad communication.

Even more concerning, half of employees admit they’re giving only the bare minimum at work.

The phenomenon isn’t just about laziness — it is symptomatic of deeper organizational issues talent management will want to pay attention to, especially considering that, according to Gallup data, disengaged employees cost U.S. companies some half a trillion dollars a year.

The productivity drain: Time lost to noise

The core issue isn’t necessarily that employees don’t want to work. Rather, “lost time almost always tracks back to poor communication,” said Emily Inverso, vp of brand and strategy at Axios HQ, a marketer of internal communications software.

When employees say they’re not sure where to focus, it likely means that goals were not clearly communicated, according to Inverso. And when they report being spread too thin, it signals that priorities aren’t obvious. Left without proper guidance, employees inevitably end up doing the wrong work — “and,” she said, “that’s when they lose time or, worse, when they burn out — doing work that’s not appreciated, valuable to the business or valued by its leaders.”

The main culprits identified in the Axios HQ report — based on responses from 457 executives and 813 employees — include “communication bloat” (read: all those unnecessary meetings) and “communication confusion,” defined as a combination of searching for information, chasing timely responses and clarifying context that’s confusing.

Eric Mochnacz, vp of operations at HR consultancy Red Clover, agrees that poor communication is the root cause of much employee disengagement. As he views it, when workers cannot connect their efforts to company success or personal growth, motivation evaporates.

“If I’m doing something in my role and it goes nowhere, why would I bother continuing that activity?” he said. The transparency deficit — from hidden salary structures to unclear promotion criteria — breeds distrust and confusion, he adds. Though employees inherently “want to show up and do good work,” they disengage when expectations remain undefined.

Mochnacz believes employers must establish clear job descriptions with measurable goals and implement ongoing performance management. His solution is elegantly simple: “Give them purpose in work, and employees will behave with purpose.”

The perception gap

Perhaps most concerning is the stark disconnect between how leadership perceives internal communications and how employees experience them. According to Axios HQ’s study:

• 80% of leaders think internal communications are helpful and relevant; just 53% of employees agree.

• 80% of leaders think internal communications are clear and engaging; just 50% of employees agree.

• 72% of leaders think internal communications are timely and reliable; just 48% of employees agree.

That perception gap explains why so many well-intentioned engagement initiatives fall flat. Leaders are solving for problems employees don’t have while missing what actually matters to their workforce, according to the report.

What employees really want

The workforce would be more likely to go above and beyond if it felt better informed about growth opportunities, its role in bringing initiatives to life, the decision-making processes of leaders, and why and when goals or operations are shifting.

There’s also a clear disconnect in motivators. “Leaders are a lot more focused on internal opportunities, where employees are asking for comp increases, better benefits, career growth plans and better flexible work policies,” Inverso said.

Several companies have successfully addressed these challenges.

Shopify tackled meeting bloat by adopting what Fast Co. describes as “a no- or low-meeting policy,” focusing only on what’s truly worth giving a forum over to and challenging what isn’t.

Meanwhile, Cox Communications transformed employee understanding of business goals by focusing on communication clarity. By doing so, it improved staff understanding of its business goals by 17 percentage points, Inverso noted.

That solution stands in stark contrast to what Cox had tried earlier to solve its problem: actually increasing the volume of communications by way of putting goals on posters, sending executives to meet with employees, and displaying screensavers with goals on company laptops. Those solutions only improved understanding by a few points, however. The breakthrough came when the company completely reformed its communications approach by way of what Axios HQ’s dubs “smart brevity” principles, a bullet point-based writing style that, in the case of Cox, resulted in employee understanding going from less than 70% to 87%.

The ‘Three-Cs’ solution

High-performing organizations are focusing on what Inverso refers to as “the Three Cs”:

• Cut what’s no longer serving you.

• Consolidate what is into fewer but more effective updates.

• Create what’s new and missing from the mix.

Successful organizations establish a clear identity for each channel they use — knowing what lives on email versus Slack or the company intranet — so that employees know where to find what’s important.

Other best practices include:

• Bringing varying perspectives into discussions to increase engagement

• Training and enabling contributors across the organization to expand the communications team

• Leveraging modern communication methods that unify voices into a single delivery mechanism

The bottom line

Not knowing your audience is the most counterproductive approach, according to Inverso. “Every executive markets their company as wholly unique, differentiated, likely to succeed,” Inverso said. “They want to attract the people who see the same future and would run through a wall for it — and then they fall flat in realizing those people are going to be just as unique.”

She advises management to invest time in getting to know its people — directly in the case of a small company, or via surveys for larger ones — then develop engagement and retention strategies that are tied to their own values.

Robert Bird, professor of business law at the University of Connecticut and author of Legal Knowledge in Organizations: A Source of Strategic and Competitive Advantage, puts it like this: “The first place any employer should look regarding problematic employee productivity is in the mirror.”

Employers should ask themselves — and ask their employees — what processes and procedures are preventing team members from reaching their highest potential. As Professor Bird puts it: “If an employee is stuck in needless meetings, for example, that’s something the employer can fix.”

Meanwhile, Evan Sohn, CEO of the workforce intelligence platform Aura Intelligence, offers this simple insight: “People do not crave balance. They crave relevance. You want energy levels back? Give people something real to build. Then get out of the way and let them make it happen.”