From coordination chaos to customer cost, a leadership wake-up call in the age of AI.
COLLEGE PARK, Md., April 16, 2025 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- More than a third of tech and knowledge workers spend 25–50% of their workday on "work about work"—the status checks, updates, and syncs required just to stay aligned. It's the hidden tax of modern work, draining time, focus, and energy.
This and other impactful new findings will be highlighted at The Coordination Crisis Summit, a one-day hybrid event aimed at confronting a growing, costly challenge: the inefficiency of modern work.
The April 17 event, organized by the University of Maryland's (UMD) Project Management Center for Excellence in collaboration with Steady, brings together tech leaders, innovators, and change agents committed to solving the hidden costs of poor coordination. It will be held at the Adele H. Stamp Union, located on UMD's bustling College Park campus.
At the heart of the summit is the unveiling of a landmark national survey, powered by occam, the advanced insight platform built by AlphaROC. The study captured responses from over 1,000 verified technology workers, team leaders, and managers nationwide. The findings shine a light on the coordination crisis that is draining productivity, fueling burnout, and threatening innovation and customer retention—while pointing to actionable solutions powered by AI.
"For years, we've focused on scaling innovation—now we must turn our attention to scaling coordination," said John Johnson, co-creator of the summit and faculty member at the University of Maryland's A. James Clark School of Engineering. "This survey gives us an unprecedented, data-driven look into how much time and talent is being lost, and it lays the foundation for a new field of study—and practice—around coordination design."
One key survey question asked: "How much of your workweek do you believe is spent on 'work about work' instead of doing the work?"—referring to time spent in meetings, documentation, context switching, and chasing approvals. The results were eye-opening:
-13.8% report spending 10% of time on work about work
-14.6% said they spend more than half of their workweek this way
-35.6% reported spending 25–50% of their time
-36.0% of respondents said they spend 10-25% of their time this way
The economic implications are staggering. Based on productivity loss alone, this growing inefficiency represents an estimated $1.2 trillion problem in the U.S. economy (as quantified by previous studies).
"We're living through a coordination crisis that's hiding in plain sight," said Henry Poydar, founder and CEO of Steady. "This summit is about acknowledging that most teams aren't just misaligned—they're drowning in friction. People are struggling for context to get work done. It's leading to burnout, disengagement, and ultimately, unhappy customers. The survey data reveals both the pain and the path forward, and that's what makes it so exciting."
Beyond coordination friction, the survey explored deeper themes critical to the future of work—AI adoption, AI as a co-innovator with people, methodologies and project management as well as AI as a replacement for work tasks, and even the growing fear of professional obsolescence because of machines. These themes will shape key sessions at the summit and offer a blueprint for teams and leaders navigating the coordination crisis.
Summit Highlights Include:
-Unveiling of the Coordination Crisis Survey: A national look into coordination pain points and the promise of new tools and frameworks.
-Panel session on The Dawn of AI Agents and the Future of Work: How AI is poised to change how we organize, decide, and execute.
-Workshops on Cracking the Coordination Code: Actionable strategies and models to rewire team dynamics.
This invite-only, working summit is designed not just to diagnose the problem but to co-create the solutions. Participants will collaborate to shape new principles for effective, AI-augmented teamwork at scale.
Journalists & Media Access:
An exclusive look at the full survey dataset—including insights on AI adoption, co-innovation, and worker sentiment—will be made available to select journalists covering the coordination crisis and the future of work.
About the University of Maryland's Project Management Center for Excellence:
The Project Management Center for Excellence at the University of Maryland leads in project management education, community development, and research, fostering innovation and expanding best practices in the field.
About Steady:
Steady is the AI-native coordination app that keeps teams effortlessly aligned. By distilling human insight and real-time data into tailored, automatic summaries, Steady eliminates the 21-hour-per-week coordination tax. It integrates seamlessly with your tools to provide clear, actionable briefs—boosting clarity, speed, and impact without adding complexity. Built on the Continuous Coordination framework, Steady empowers teams to stay focused, make faster decisions, and deliver exceptional work.
About AlphaROC:
AlphaROC is the data science company behind occamTM, a machine-learning powered market research platform generating personalized, actionable insights longitudinally and at unprecedented scale. Investment firms, corporations, and trade organizations use occamTM to anticipate emerging trends, inform strategy and decision-making, identify target audiences, and much more. occamAI, our fine-tuned LLM, enables users across all of these organizations to ask questions like market research professionals.
Media Contact
Robert Herschbach, University of Maryland, 410-245-8959, [email protected], https://pm.umd.edu/
SOURCE University of Maryland
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