It can require serious detective skills to spot the hidden workarounds and the manual work lurking in organizations.

Many employees are diligent with their responsibilities and have little visibility into what happens before or after their tasks. It requires walking in the employee’s shoes and connecting all the steps in a workflow to identify productivity killers. Manual tasks, the time lost waiting for others to complete their work, long-chain emails, and repeat meetings are some of the easy indicators of inefficiencies.

Small workarounds lead to costly inefficiencies

The most significant productivity killers are costly drag forces, especially in industries that integrate field work with back-office operations. Manufacturing, construction, and professional service organizations that conduct client-specific, project-based work may also utilize multiple project management and collaboration tools. The lack of tools and standards is not only costly, but it also prevents the collection of uniform data about operational health and profitability.

This type of work has a name – gray work – referring to the unstructured, manual, repetitive, or undocumented tasks performed to connect processes, move data between systems, manually create reports, fill workflow gaps, or compensate for system limitations. What organizations need today is dynamic work management that is more flexible, scalable, and efficient.

Gray work is paradoxical. According to the 2025 Gray Work Report, 80% of working professionals report that their organizations have increased their investment in software designed to enhance productivity and collaboration. However, 90% report feeling overwhelmed by the number of software solutions needed to get work done on a typical day. Furthermore, 59% of respondents agree that it feels harder to be productive in their day-to-day work than ever before.

Identifying the more significant manual work areas

Every technologist should conduct a simple process mining exercise in their organization to identify gray work and its impacts. Let’s look at three common productivity killers and what to do about them.

1. Moving data between SaaS platforms

Consider an HVAC repair service. They utilizes one tool for time tracking workers, another for asset management, and a third for scheduling. Every Friday, it takes one project manager several hours to pull data from these systems and update the various schedules. As inefficient as that sounds, what’s worse is when a heatwave drives a spike in service calls. The project manager scrambles to assign crews to the most critical situations, say an urgent care facility that’s lost AC.

This is an example of SaaS sprawl, where organizations have procured different SaaS solutions without the skills to integrate them. A configurable and integrated field service management solution can help reduce the weekly gray work. More importantly, enable the company to be more responsive during peak service periods.

2. Duplicating spreadsheets when new projects start

One of the most important tools in mid-sized construction firms is the work-in-progress (WIP) report, which project managers use to track operations and risks. In many construction companies, this “tool” is merely a spreadsheet that consolidates data from multiple systems. Every project manager has their own version of the WIP report. What’s worse, the CFO only sees a dashboard from all active projects twice a month. There’s significant behind the scenes data wrangling, i.e., gray work, to aggregate and normalize this data.   

The issue with WIP reports is that they are dashboards that connect data from multiple sources, calculators for performing forecasts, and annotation tools for addressing data discrepancies. While project managers can use spreadshees to address these issues, it leads to a second set of gray work in aggregating and normalizing data for organization-level decision-making.  

Virtually every project-based organization has some form of this issue. When the work requires a lot of flexibility from one project to another, it can be challenging to find one application that’s optimized for every need.

But there are solutions! Consider developing the WIP report on a low-code platform with built-in automation capabilities to exchange data from platforms like Procore, QuickBooks, Autodesk, and other integrations. The advantage is that IT, partnered with operational experts, can codevelop a standard, then add project-specific customizations where required.

3. Turning around contract reviews from months to weeks

Every organization has its own contract management process, which often involves a mess of redlines, version control headaches, and statuses. A contract often bounces around between procurement, legal, IT, and other reviewers after each round of back-and-forths with a supplier. Without a single tool in place to manage the process, reviewers are often left guessing when they are needed for input and what the contract’s current status is. No wonder it can take months to get a contract approved in many organizations!

Now you can procure a contract or document management solution if your organization processes hundreds of contracts on a regular basis. However, SMBs shouldn’t settle for a gray work process. Instead, look at contract management built on top of a dynamic work automation platform that supports document creation. Contract status becomes transparent, notifications alert people when they are needed, and standard contracts are converted into templates with field values populated from a centrally managed database.

Gray work is everywhere; just follow the handoffs

Want more examples of gray work?

• Consider the handoffs between sales and project pipelines where critical information exchange between demand and supply is needed.  
• Review how assets are tracked across the manufacturing shop floor to support the lifecycle of acquisition, maintenance, and decommissioning.
• Manage the bidding process in construction, professional services, and field services when job complexities are non-uniform and estimating requires significant expertise.

I’ve been using low-code platforms to address gray work in businesses across several industries for over twenty years. The secret to reducing gray work lies in identifying common requirements versus specialized needs, and then using a centralized and integrated platform to support the workflow.

This post is brought to you by Quickbase.

The views and opinions expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views and opinions of Quickbase.