Workplace communication now occupies most of many employees’ digital workday. Microsoft telemetry found that users spent 60% of Microsoft 365 time on emails, chats, and meetings in a rolling 28-day period ending March 2024. More recent telemetry ending February 15, 2025 recorded an average of 117 emails and 153 Teams messages received per weekday. These figures show the scale of communication, but they also raise a practical question: how much of it helps people understand priorities, make decisions, and do focused work?
Table of contents
- How much time employees spend communicating
- Meeting volume, timing, and structure
- Email, chat, and after-hours communication
- Manager feedback and communication gaps
- Remote-work communication and team connection
- Collaboration, clarity, and work outcomes
How much time employees spend communicating
Communication is not a small part of the workday. Across Microsoft 365 apps, the average employee spent 57% of work time communicating in meetings, email, and chat during a rolling 28-day period ending March 2023 (2023 Work Trend Index: Annual Report). In the same period, the heaviest email users—the top 25% by duration—spent 8.8 hours per week on email, while the heaviest meeting users spent 7.5 hours per week in meetings (Microsoft, 2023 Work Trend Index: Annual Report).
The later Microsoft measure was higher: users spent 60% of their Microsoft 365 time on emails, chats, and meetings in the rolling 28-day period ending March 2024 (2024 Work Trend Index Annual Report). In that 2024 Work Trend Index survey, 68% of surveyed workers said they struggled with the pace and volume of work, and 46% said they felt burned out.
The cost is not only the time spent in communication tools. In the 2023 Work Trend Index survey, 68% of workers said they did not have enough uninterrupted focus time during the workday, while 62% said they struggled with spending too much time searching for information (Microsoft, 2023 Work Trend Index: Annual Report). A communication system can therefore create friction even when every message, meeting, or document is individually understandable.
Meeting volume, timing, and structure
Meeting patterns reveal how communication competes with focus and preparation. Microsoft telemetry ending February 15, 2025 found that 50% of meetings took place during the 9–11 a.m. or 1–3 p.m. peak-productivity windows. Tuesdays carried 23% of the weekly meeting load, the highest share of any weekday, while Fridays carried 16% (Breaking down the infinite workday).
Not every meeting is planned. The same telemetry found that 57% of meetings were ad hoc calls without a calendar invite, and one in 10 scheduled meetings was booked at the last minute. Meetings with 65 or more attendees were the fastest-growing meeting type. Thirty percent of meetings spanned multiple time zones, and the share of meetings spanning multiple time zones was up 35% from 2021 (Microsoft, Breaking down the infinite workday).
| Meeting indicator | Reported measure | Measurement period |
|---|---|---|
| Meetings during peak-productivity windows | 50% | Telemetry ending February 15, 2025 |
| Weekly meeting load on Tuesdays | 23% | Telemetry ending February 15, 2025 |
| Ad hoc calls without calendar invites | 57% | Telemetry ending February 15, 2025 |
| Meetings across multiple time zones | 30% | Telemetry ending February 15, 2025 |
| Increase in cross-time-zone meeting share | 35% | 2021 to February 15, 2025 |
Timing pressure also appears outside ordinary hours. Meetings starting after 8 p.m. were up 16% year over year through February 15, 2025. PowerPoint edits spiked 122% during the final 10 minutes before a meeting, a pattern consistent with last-minute preparation in the observed telemetry (Breaking down the infinite workday).
Meeting volume has also changed over time. People were in three times more Teams meetings and calls per week than in February 2020, representing a 192% increase in the rolling 28-day period ending March 2023 (Microsoft, 2023 Work Trend Index: Annual Report). Yet only 35% of surveyed workers said they would be missed in the majority of their meetings. That gap suggests that attendance alone is not a reliable measure of meeting value.
Email, chat, and after-hours communication
The average Microsoft 365 worker received 117 emails per day and 153 Teams messages per weekday in telemetry ending February 15, 2025 (Breaking down the infinite workday). The channel mix is changing too: mass emails sent to 20 or more recipients increased 7% year over year, while one-on-one email threads declined 5%. Teams messages received per person increased 6% year over year globally.
Communication also begins early and continues late. Forty percent of people who were online at 6 a.m. were reviewing email for the day’s priorities. The average employee sent or received more than 50 messages outside core business hours. Twenty-nine percent of active workers returned to their inboxes by 10 p.m. (Microsoft, Breaking down the infinite workday).
Weekend activity was visible as well. Nearly 20% of employees actively working on weekends checked email before noon on both Saturday and Sunday. More than 5% of employees actively working on weekends returned to email on Sunday evening at 6 p.m. or later. These figures describe observed activity, not a recommended work schedule, and the source’s definition of “actively working” matters when interpreting them.
Manager feedback and communication gaps
Communication quality depends on whether people can give and receive useful feedback. In a 2024 Gallup manager study, 42% of U.S. employees reported having an opportunity to formally provide feedback to their manager, but only 24% reported formally rating their manager’s performance. Thirty-six percent of managers said they received feedback from peers as part of a formal feedback process (The Strengths, Weaknesses and Blind Spots of Managers).
Managers and individual contributors did not always see communication in the same way. Their ratings differed by 21 percentage points for responsiveness to calls and messages and by 19 percentage points for high-quality feedback. Nearly 60% of managers believed they were doing a good job recognizing their teams, compared with 35% of individual contributors. Only 12% of employees reported being asked how they like to be recognized (Gallup, The Strengths, Weaknesses and Blind Spots of Managers).
Feedback frequency showed another perception gap: 20% of employees said they received feedback weekly, compared with 50% of managers who said they delivered it weekly. Six in 10 managers said they were not at an advanced or expert level in developing employees and helping them create career paths (Gallup, The Strengths, Weaknesses and Blind Spots of Managers).
The reported quality of the conversation matters. In a Gallup study reported in 2025, 16% of nearly 15,000 employees said their last conversation with their manager was extremely meaningful. Across seven Gallup studies totaling 44,025 responses, about seven in 10 employees were highly engaged when they strongly agreed they had received meaningful feedback in the past week, versus about one in four when they did not strongly agree (Span of Control: What’s the Optimal Team Size for Managers?). These are associations reported by the studies, not proof that one communication event alone caused engagement.
Remote-work communication and team connection
Remote work adds a connection challenge alongside its flexibility. In Buffer’s 2023 survey, 15% of remote-worker respondents identified collaboration and communication as a work-from-home difficulty. At the same time, 75% said they felt connected to colleagues or clients, while 17% said they did not (2023 State Of Remote Work).
Among remote workers who felt disconnected, 56% cited having no opportunity to connect socially, 53% said they did not interact with colleagues, and 51% said they did not know their colleagues as people. Thirty-nine percent of remote workers said they did not know how to share or promote their successes, and 37% said they were left out of organic or water-cooler conversations (Buffer, 2023 State Of Remote Work).
Distributed teams also have coordination needs. Sixty-two percent of remote workers said people on their immediate team were distributed across multiple time zones. Seventy-eight percent of respondents said their companies had systems and technology for remote-team collaboration and communication, while 71% said their companies held one-to-one meetings as a remote-work support practice (Buffer, 2023 State Of Remote Work). Technology availability and human connection are related, but the figures do not establish that systems alone create belonging.
Collaboration, clarity, and work outcomes
Communication is closely tied to coordination, but collaboration quality matters more than message volume. In Asana’s 2023 survey, 55% of workers at collaborative organizations reported revenue growth over the previous three years, nearly twice the share reported at weak collaborators. Seventy-nine percent of workers at collaborative organizations felt well prepared to respond to emerging business challenges, four times the share at weak collaborators (Asana Anatomy of Work Global Index 2023).
The same survey found that 92% of workers at collaborative organizations said their work had value, compared with 50% at organizations with weak collaboration. Knowledge workers estimated that 58% of their day was spent on work about work, including coordination rather than skilled or strategic work. They estimated that improved processes could save 4.9 hours per week, while reporting 2.8 hours per week in unnecessary meetings. Senior leaders reported spending 3.6 hours per week in unnecessary meetings (Asana, Asana Anatomy of Work Global Index 2023).
Clear goals were associated with stronger expectations about business performance. Seventy-three percent of workers with clear, connected goals said their company was ready to achieve a competitive advantage, versus 23% of workers without clear, connected goals. Because these findings come from survey comparisons, they describe reported relationships rather than a measured causal effect.
Taken together, the statistics point to a communication system with high volume, uneven timing, and meaningful gaps in feedback and connection. The most useful conversations are therefore not necessarily the most frequent ones: they are the conversations that clarify priorities, make participation purposeful, create space for focused work, and help people understand how their work connects to shared goals.