Employees spend less than two hours on meaningful work
Australians are losing valuable hours and risking their mental well-being due to repetitive tasks in the workplace, a new report has revealed.
Miro's 2025 Momentum at Work Report explored how evolving work trends globally are influencing employees' ability to deliver meaningful work.
In Australia, it found that employees only get to have an hour and 42 minutes of strategic work, which includes creative and strategic efforts that drive innovation.
Most of their time at work is spent on maintenance work,where they lose six hourson repetitive tasks such as meetings, email, and paperwork.
Employees seem to be aware of too much maintenance work happening, as 54% of them feel like they're achieving less despite working more hours, according to the findings.
This lack of balance between strategic and maintenance work is driving one in four Australians to emotional overload at least once a month.
Organisational silos also present
Meanwhile, another factor preventing employees from delivering meaningful work is organisational silos, which prevent effective collaboration,according to the findings.
Nearly two in three (63%) employees said information and data are often held across fragmented tools in their organisation.
More than half also said there are communication (58%) and functional (51%) silos in their workplace, with 49% attributing them to outdated and legacy tools used at work.
It's clear that maintenance work and silos are making it difficult to do great work and slowing innovation. This is bad for both individual morale, and for organisations looking to accelerate innovation. It doesn't have to be this way, said Tomás Dostal Freire, CIO & Head of Business Transformation at Miro, in a statement.
Is AI the key?
Employees are optimistic about the benefits of AIin delivering meaningful work.
More than half of the respondents believe AI will reduce the burden of reporting (58%) and the need to redo work in different tools or apps (60%).
They also believe that AI can reduce silos that hold back:
Information sharing (65%)
Communication (57%)
Cross-functional collaboration (45%)
Freire said AI is already being used in workplacesto cut time spent on admin tasks.
But this is only scratching the surface, the Miro official said.
Truly meaningful transformation comes when AI understands the full team context and contributes to team speed, not just individual task automation. Now teams can spend more time delivering the high-value work they enjoy, while simultaneously delivering infinitely better quality and results for the business.
https://www.hcamag.com/au/specialisation/employee-engagement/australians-waste-six-hours-on-repetitive-work-report-finds/551385
