Waiting on Colleagues for Information: The Cost of Idle Time and Stalled Work

The tolerated pain

A project manager cannot finalise a client update until finance sends the latest billing figures. A sales rep cannot confirm a delivery date until the warehouse replies with stock levels. A payroll clerk cannot close the month until three branch managers send their overtime sheets. Each of them has asked. Each is now waiting, checking their inbox, starting something else, and coming back later to see whether the answer has arrived.

Waiting for information is so built into office life that it rarely registers as a cost. People fill the gap with other work, so nobody is visibly idle. But the original task has stopped, the person has switched to something less important, and the customer or colleague at the end of the chain is now waiting too.

This article is about the moment when work stops because one person holds information another person needs and must actively send it. It is different from the cost of work waiting for approval, where the delay is a decision. Here the delay is simply data that already exists but sits with the wrong person.

Why businesses put up with it

• Information lives with people, not in shared places. Figures are in someone's spreadsheet, stock is in someone's head, and the only way to get it is to ask.
• The sender has other priorities. To the person holding the information, the request is an interruption to their own work, so it waits until they have a gap.
• Waiting looks like being busy. The person waiting switches to other tasks, so managers see activity rather than a stalled job.
• Nobody owns the handoff. There is no agreed time for a reply, no reminder and no escalation, only follow-up emails.

Operational symptoms

• "Waiting on X" appearing in status updates week after week;
• repeated follow-up emails and messages asking for the same information;
• work completed in bursts after the information finally arrives, then rushed;
• the same person being asked for the same kind of figures by different colleagues;
• customers told "we will come back to you" while internal requests travel;
• month-end, quote and reporting deadlines that slip because one input is late.

Why waiting is a recognised waste

Lean management has long treated waiting as one of the seven classic wastes. The Lean Enterprise Institute's definition of the seven wastes describes waiting as people standing idle because, among other causes, the parts they need have not arrived. In an office, the missing part is usually information. The Institute's explanation of muda, mura and muri adds that uneven flow makes people "hurry and then wait", which is exactly the pattern when an input arrives late and the work must then be rushed to meet the deadline.

Searching for and chasing information is a common frustration, not a quirk of one business. Microsoft's Work Trend Index report Will AI Fix Work? found that 62% of respondents struggle with too much time spent searching for information. That is a survey of knowledge workers generally, not a measure of any particular business, but it shows how widespread the experience is.

How the pain becomes money

• Labour cost: time spent requesting, chasing, restarting and re-familiarising with paused work.
• Opportunity cost: people fill the wait with lower-value tasks rather than the work that mattered most.
• Revenue and cash-flow delay: quotes, invoices and customer answers held up by a missing figure delay sales and collections.
• Error cost: work rushed after a late input is more likely to contain mistakes.
• Sender cost: the person holding the information is interrupted repeatedly for requests that could have been self-served.

An illustrative cost model

This example is illustrative; every figure is an assumption to show the method. Picture a 60-person Johannesburg logistics and freight business where operations, finance and sales depend on each other's information.

On these assumptions there are 180 requests a week, each costing 30 minutes across both sides, or 90 hours a week. At R300 an hour that is R27,000 a week and roughly R1.24 million a year. This figure counts only handling time. It does not include delayed invoices, slower quotes or rushed mistakes, which may be larger. If half of these requests could be replaced by shared, self-service information, the saving on handling time alone would be around R620,000 a year. Your own numbers will differ; the value lies in counting requests for a few weeks.

When it becomes commercially urgent

1. Customer quotes, delivery confirmations or invoices are regularly delayed by internal requests.
2. Month-end or reporting deadlines depend on several people sending inputs by hand.
3. A few individuals are overwhelmed by requests for information only they hold.
4. The business is adding staff, which multiplies the number of people asking.

What better looks like

The fastest request is the one nobody needs to make. Information that is asked for repeatedly is published where people can find it: a shared report, a dashboard, a live stock view, a customer record everyone can read. Where information must be prepared, it is sent automatically on a schedule. Microsoft's documentation on Power BI email subscriptions, for example, describes sending report snapshots to named people hourly, daily, weekly, monthly or after the data refreshes. Other reporting tools offer similar scheduling.

For inputs that genuinely require a person, the handoff is designed rather than improvised: a named owner, an agreed reply time, a reminder before the deadline and a visible queue. How to design a handoff that cannot depend on memory covers the mechanics. When most inputs arrive but one is always late, the pattern described in when one missing item stops a larger process is usually at work.

Practical next actions

1. Log requests for two weeks. Ask one team to note every time they wait for information from a colleague: what, from whom, and how long it took.
2. Find the repeat requests. Information asked for more than once a week by more than one person is a candidate for self-service.
3. Publish or schedule it. Turn the most frequent requests into a shared report, view or scheduled delivery.
4. Set reply times for the rest. Agree how quickly each type of request should be answered and who covers when the owner is away.
5. Measure the waiting, not just the work. As when work sits waiting more than it moves explains, elapsed time often far exceeds working time.

Mapping where work waits and redesigning the flow of information is central to Mellorca's digital operations improvement work.

Bottom line

Every time someone has to ask for information and wait, two people pay: the one waiting and the one interrupted to send it. The business pays a third time when customers wait too. Counting these requests for a few weeks usually reveals a short list of repeat questions, and publishing those answers where people can reach them is one of the cheapest ways to give a business back its time.

Sources and further reading

• What are the 7 Wastes in Lean? | Lean Enterprise Institute
• Muda, Mura, Muri - Get a Quick Introduction | Lean Enterprise Institute
• https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/worklab/work-trend-index/will-ai-fix-work
• Email Subscriptions for Reports and Dashboards in the Power BI Service - Power BI