A lot of jobs today aren’t about creativity or strategy. They’re about moving information around—copying from one app into another, double‑checking reports, and juggling spreadsheets. Companies hire people to be the “glue” that holds disconnected systems together, thinking it’s cheaper than fixing the systems. But research shows this approach is costly, error‑prone, and drives burnout.

Humans as the Middlemen

Imagine you’re a salesperson who just closed a deal. You open your CRM to enter the customer’s details, then switch to the inventory app to mark that item as sold. Next, you update an Excel sheet for monthly reporting, and finally you send an email notification to accounting. That single transaction now involves four different tools and four manual handoffs—all because nobody built integrations in the first place.

Companies assume paying a person a salary is cheaper than investing in proper system integration, but they overlook the hidden costs of human errors, typos, and the mental fatigue that comes from repetitive tasks.

The Real Cost of Disconnected Tools

Studies back this up. Knowledge workers spend a majority of their time on “work about work”—status updates, chasing information, duplicating tasks—leaving less than half their day for truly skilled activities. Other analyses report that more than half of the typical workday goes to coordination and maintenance rather than core responsibilities.

Desk-based employees devote a large chunk of time to repetitive, low‑value tasks such as data entry and unnecessary meetings. At 40 hours per week, that’s about 24 hours lost to busywork alone.

Impact on Tech, Sales, and Logistics

In tech teams, engineers often spend more hours exporting logs, migrating data between environments, or updating multiple dashboards than they do writing new features. Salespeople find themselves manually syncing leads between their CRM and marketing platforms rather than engaging prospects.

Logistics staff shuttle shipment statuses from warehouse management systems into customer‑facing portals and then reconcile those logs in billing spreadsheets. In each case, the role becomes less about expertise and more about acting as a human API—shuttling data between siloed systems instead of creating value.

Tangible Consequences

The costs of treating employees as manual integrators add up quickly. Poor data quality from manual processes costs organizations millions per year. The typical employee loses several hours each week to pointless meetings and duplicate work.

Surveys also reveal that most workers feel digitally exhausted by juggling too many unintegrated tools. That exhaustion not only hurts morale but also increases turnover, which carries its own recruitment and training costs.

A Better Path: Automation & Integration

Automation isn’t about replacing people—it’s about freeing them to focus on high‑value tasks. Tools like Zapier, Make, Airtable and Power Query can link disparate apps, automate data flows, and eliminate manual handoffs. For example, one customer‑support team automated ticket creation and order‑status updates across three apps, cutting manual steps by 70%, reducing errors by 34%, and saving some 9,000 agent‑hours per year.

When properly set up, these systems work around the clock without fatigue, distraction or random mistakes.

How to Upgrade Your Role

Don’t settle for being the oil in a broken machine. Start by mapping your own workflow: write down each repetitive step and estimate how many hours you spend on it weekly. Identify those tasks as prime candidates for automation. Then bring a clear proposal to your manager—something like, “I spend about five hours per week manually syncing data between the CRM and our inventory system. Could we automate that?” At the same time, invest in learning basic integration skills. Even a little experience with no‑code tools makes you more valuable and shifts your role from data janitor to system improver.

Final Thought: Fix the System, Don’t Patch It

Treating employees as cheap glue between broken systems might seem cost‑effective in the short run, but research shows it’s a false economy. Manual processes drive errors, waste time, and burn out talent. By investing in better integrations and smart automation, companies can reclaim wasted hours, improve accuracy, and let their people focus on the creative, strategic work that really moves the needle. Stop transferring data. Start transforming work.

Enjoyed this deep dive? Let me know in the comments: have you ever been the “human glue” at your company? What manual tasks would you automate first?

Sources

• Asana. Anatomy of Work Index 2025.

• Slack Workforce Lab. The State of Work, 2024.

• Slack Workforce Lab. Digital Exhaustion in the Modern Workplace, 2024.

• Independent analysis on work coordination time, 2024.

• Gartner. The Cost of Poor Data Quality, 2023.

• Workflow Journal. Case study: Customer‑support automation saving 9,000 agent‑hours, 2023.