Discover the cost of shadow work at your company

Shadow work is the work behind the work. The repetitive, non-strategic tasks that exist in every role but don’t move it forward.Every week, employees lose hours to an endless stream of invisible tasks that sit around their core responsibilities. For employees, it’s booking travel, filing expenses, and chasing approvals. Work that keeps things running but drains time and energy without real impact.For finance teams, it shows up as a constant cycle of chasing receipts, rekeying data, and reconciling spend. Necessary work, but manual, repetitive, and far from strategic.

Shadow work spans any task that’s necessary but not strategic. The biggest drains, according to the research are:

• Expenses and receipts
• Travel booking and admin
• Invoice chasing and processing
• Approvals and internal admin
• Reporting and reconciliation 

All of this put together quickly drains people and their time week after week.

According to The Cost of Shadow Work (September 2025), a Forrester Consulting study commissioned by Perk, employees spend an average of 7 hours per week on shadow work. And the impact goes beyond time spent. After each interruption, it takes around 11 minutes to refocus, compounding the loss of productive working hours across the week. Some tasks may be less frequent, but they carry a disproportionate level of frustration. In fact, 45% of employees say shadow work has contributed to burnout. The real cost isn’t just the hours lost, it’s the opportunity cost of what those teams could have been doing instead.

The cost of shadow work is measured in lost time, focus, and productivity across every person, every day. Forrester Consulting developed a cost-of-shadow-work model that combines survey-reported time spent on tasks with average salary benchmarks by country and industry. This allowed us to quantify the monetary impact of shadow work at an organizational, industry, and national level for the six countries covered in the research.

Reducing shadow work isn’t about adding more tools. It’s about designing better systems that remove friction from everyday tasks. When processes sit across disconnected tools, shadow work builds up. The fix is to bring everything into one connected platform. The result is fewer interruptions, less back-and-forth, and more time for real work that actually moves the business forward.