The Hidden Cost of Unanswered Questions
The average knowledge worker spends 47 minutes finding an answer to a question that already exists somewhere in the organization. Here's what that actually costs.
The 47-Minute Problem
Research consistently shows that knowledge workers spend a significant portion of their time searching for information. The question isn't whether your company has this problem — it's how much it's costing you.
Consider a 100-person company where each employee searches for internal information 3 times per week. At an average fully-loaded cost of $85/hour and 47 minutes per search, that's over $350,000 per year spent on employees looking for answers that already exist somewhere in your organization.
The Compounding Effects
The direct time cost is only the beginning. When employees can't find answers, they interrupt colleagues — creating a cascade of productivity loss. Senior employees become human search engines, spending hours answering the same questions repeatedly instead of doing high-value work.
New hires suffer the most. Without quick access to institutional knowledge, onboarding stretches from weeks to months. Every unanswered question is a moment where a new employee feels lost, unproductive, and disconnected.
The Knowledge Drain
When experienced employees leave, they take years of accumulated knowledge with them. The procedures they developed, the decisions they made, the context behind policies — all of it disappears. The next person in the role starts from scratch, repeating mistakes that were already solved.
This institutional memory loss is invisible on balance sheets but devastating to operations. Companies don't realize the cost until a critical employee departs and teams scramble to reconstruct years of undocumented knowledge.
A Solvable Problem
The solution isn't more documentation — companies already have documentation. The problem is findability. A well-implemented knowledge AI doesn't require employees to know which document contains the answer or what keywords to search for. They ask a question in plain English and get a cited answer in seconds.
At $800/month, ThreadOps pays for itself in the first week for most teams. The math isn't complicated — it's just a matter of recognizing that the status quo has a cost, even if it doesn't show up as a line item.
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