No one puts “chasing updates” or “recreating spreadsheets” on their job description. Yet across industries, this busywork, which we call Gray Work, is quietly eating up hours, burning out teams, and killing momentum.
Gray Work is the hidden, manual, duplicative effort caused by broken systems and disconnected tools. It’s not new, but it’s accelerating, 56% of professionals say manual work has increased in 2025, up from 50% in 2023. We’re constantly switching between apps, just to find the information we need. It’s happening everywhere, from high-rise construction sites to healthcare command centers.
That’s why Quickbase’s 2025 Gray Work research set out to understand just how deeply this problem runs across five core industries: construction, manufacturing, healthcare, financial services, and professional services. The findings were revealing. The question is no longer whether Gray Work exists. It’s how much of it we’re tolerating, where it’s taking root, and why it’s still so hard to eliminate.
Let’s unpack what we found.
1. Who’s Losing the Most Time to Gray Work?
Time is the ultimate currency, and Gray Work is draining it fast. But some industries are losing more than others.
The biggest losses are in professional and financial services: nearly one-third of professional services teams and one in five finance professionals spend over half their work week just chasing down information. That’s the equivalent of working a second full-time job, but one that adds no real value.
Construction and manufacturing aren’t off the hook either. Field workers and ops leaders are spending upwards of 10 hours per week chasing clarity across tools and people. The drag is subtler but still significant in healthcare. Nearly half of respondents say manual work increased this year, while only 7.6% report spending over 40 hours a week on high-impact work.
It’s not just about time. It’s about focus, alignment, and confidence in the work being done. And right now, across the board, all of those are in short supply.
2. Measuring the Impact: From Delays to Duplicates
It’s easy to dismiss Gray Work as background noise. But the ripple effect is real and growing.
In both professional services and manufacturing, over half of the respondents reported tangible consequences: missed deadlines, miscommunications, and duplicate efforts. These frustrations are translating directly into delays, rework, and lost productivity.
In Healthcare, the impact is more insidious. Despite a workforce steeped in process and compliance, only a fraction reports spending meaningful time on the work that truly matters. In the construction and financial services industry (FSI), the challenge often masquerades as business as usual until the project overruns, the audit flags, or the budget bursts.
Across all five industries, there's a mounting tension: high effort, low output. Teams are moving fast, but a lot of the time, they’re just going in circles.
3. What’s Behind All This Gray Work?
Every industry has its version of chaos, but many of the underlying causes are the same.
Disconnected data is the biggest culprit. Whether it’s a contractor in the field updating a dashboard or a healthcare manager checking spreadsheets, the inability to see and share real-time information is a major drag on efficiency.
Manual processes are another constant. Even in tech-heavy sectors like FSI and Pro Services, sophisticated tools haven’t eliminated repetitive work. Instead, they’ve often layered more complexity on top.
A lot of these tools are just adding more complexity and too many of them are leading to app sprawl.
And then there’s the sprawl: app overload, too many systems doing half the job, and teams caught in the middle. Construction and Manufacturing face this in the form of scattered field data. Healthcare deals with fragmented compliance workflows. FSI is drowning in point solutions that don’t speak to each other.
The way work gets done is fundamentally broken in places, and teams are paying the price.
4. Teck Stack: When Software Adds to the Problem
Investing in software is supposed to reduce friction. But across these industries, tech stacks have become both a solution and a source of the problem.
Professional Services professionals toggle between 8 to 10 different platforms a day, often duplicating effort across each one. In FSI, the story’s similar: overlapping tools, each promising transformation, but few delivering cohesion. Even in Manufacturing, where digital transformation is well underway, over 30% report only “somewhat” trusting their own data.
Healthcare’s reliance on spreadsheets is telling. Despite an abundance of modern tools, 55% still use spreadsheets daily to manage critical workflows. That’s not an efficiency play; it’s a survival tactic.
And while most respondents say their tools technically boost productivity, the lived experience tells another story: overwhelm, data doubt, and an endless parade of logins.
5. What Each Industry Wants Most
If there’s one unifying theme, it’s this: teams know what they need, they just haven’t found the right way to get it.
Construction teams are craving real-time visibility in the field. For them, what matters most is clarity between teams in the field and those in the office. Financial Services teams want fewer, better tools. They’re inundated with platforms and are reaching the limits of what fragmented systems can support.
In healthcare, automation is the need of the hour, if it comes with built-in guardrails to ensure regulatory compliance. Manufacturers want visibility: better dashboards, unified resource planning, and fewer blind spots. And Professional Services teams? They want flexibility and customizable platforms that let them mold the tech to how their teams actually work.
Every request reflects pain: too many systems, too many gaps, and too little cohesion.
6. The Future Outlook: Who’s Ready to Adapt?
AI is the wildcard and possibly the turning point.
Daily usage of AI is highest in Professional Services, Manufacturing, and FSI. These sectors are experimenting aggressively, budgeting more for AI in 2025, and showing high curiosity about emerging tools. Use cases like auto-generating client reports, anomaly detection in production data, and AI-driven audit prep are already in motion.
Healthcare and Construction are moving slower, but not because they’re uninterested. Their caution is grounded in risk: where AI intersects with data integrity, safety, and governance, the stakes are simply higher.
AI is viewed as a way out of Gray Work, but only if it integrates with existing systems, not just adds another layer. Industries with agility in their culture, not just their tools, will be the first to unlock AI’s real potential.
What It All Adds Up To
Gray Work is the result of disconnection. It’s what happens when we stack tools on top of tools, process on top of process, and no one takes a step back to rethink how work should flow.
Across every industry, we’re seeing a reckoning. The "More Tools, More Automation, More Everything" playbook is cracking under pressure. The future belongs to platforms that simplify, integrate, and adapt.
That’s where Quickbase fits in — not as another tool in the stack, but as the connective tissue between them. It doesn’t replace what you have. It makes what you already use work together.
So, here’s the challenge: take one Gray Work problem at a time and fix it. Connect that field report. Automate that intake form. Build that dashboard you can trust.
Because eliminating Gray Work isn’t a one-and-done transformation. It’s a thousand tiny decisions that make work, well, work.
