What's not knowing
costing you?
Two questions. One real number. The hidden tax every company pays for scattered knowledge.
Stop losing $2,169,038 every year.
Simply Asking turns scattered knowledge into cited answers, wherever your team needs them.
Talk to our teamHow we calculated this.
Five published studies. Five conservative floors. Every multiplier baked in, so you only have to know your headcount and average salary.
1.Search & rediscovery
Knowledge workers spend an average of 9.3 hours every week searching for or recreating information they should already have. That's 484 hours per employee per year. Roughly 12 full work-weeks of paid time, lost to scattered knowledge.
Read the study: McKinsey, "The Social Economy"2.Context-switching tax
Every interruption costs roughly 23 minutes of recovery time. We count 3 knowledge-related interruptions per worker per day. That's a conservative slice of Mark's broader research, which cites 6 to 11 total interruptions across all sources.
Read the study: Gloria Mark (UC Irvine), "The Cost of Interrupted Work"3.Onboarding ramp drag
New hires take roughly 90 days to reach baseline productivity and operate at about 50% productivity during that window. Multi-location and franchise teams compound this loss every time they open a new site.
Read the study: SHRM Onboarding Research4.Repeat customer interactions
About 35% of customer-facing reps' time goes to questions that have already been answered before. We assume 20% of your headcount is customer-facing, the SMB B2B average.
Read the study: Salesforce State of Service5.Knowledge walking out the door
Median tenure in the US is 4.1 years, implying about 24% annual turnover. We charge 25% of each departing employee's annual salary as institutional-knowledge loss. The SHRM range is 16% for entry roles up to 213% for executives, so we picked the conservative middle.
Read the study: BLS Employee Tenure Summary