Deep Dive Tools Calculator

Your Team

How many people are on this team?

On average, how many hours per week does each person work?

Underused Tools — Reality Check

Research* shows Underused Tools is one of the most consistently underestimated time drains in modern teams:

Most organisations use less than 30% of the features available in Microsoft 365
Teams using manual workarounds spend an average of 5 hours per week on tasks tools could automate
Information scattered across platforms adds an average of 2 hours per week in search and re-creation time
Employees who feel confident with their tools report significantly higher focus and output quality

*Sources:

- Microsoft 365 adoption: Microsoft Work Trend Index, annual productivity research

- Manual workarounds: Salesforce, "State of the Connected Customer" report

- Information search time: McKinsey Global Institute, "The Social Economy" report

Think about how your team uses the tools available to them — Teams, Outlook, Copilot, and Microsoft 365 broadly. For each statement, choose the option that best reflects your reality.

1. People use the tools available to them with confidence and clarity.

Usually Sometimes Rarely

2. Information is easy to find — people know where things live and can retrieve them quickly.

Usually Sometimes Rarely

3. The team avoids manual workarounds — they use the tools to do what the tools are designed to do.

Usually Sometimes Rarely

4. Communication happens in the right place — Teams for collaboration, email for external, not everything in email.

Usually Sometimes Rarely

5. When a new tool or feature is introduced, people are able to use it effectively within a reasonable time.

Usually Sometimes Rarely

6. AI tools like Copilot are being used to reduce repetitive work, not just ignored or avoided.

Yes, actively Partially Not yet

7. People feel that their tools help them do their best work — not get in the way of it.

Mostly agree Mixed views Mostly disagree

Your Underused Tools — The Drain

Tool clarity score0%

Heavy dragFull capability

Monthly Capacity Drained by Underused Tools

0 hours

0 hours per year

Full-Time Equivalent (FTE)

Full-time people worth of capacity lost annually

*Underused Tools scoring reflects the gap between available capability and actual usage. A score of 100% means your team uses the tools with full clarity and confidence.

What this means: Based on your responses, your team's tool clarity score is 0% — meaning 0% of available tool capability is draining away through workarounds, uncertainty, and underuse. The tools are present. The clarity is not. And that gap has a cost.

Plug this drain this week

Find one manual task your team does every week. Something repetitive — formatting, copying, scheduling, summarising. Is there a tool that could do this faster? There almost certainly is.

Map where information lives. Ask your team: when you need to find something, where do you look first? If the answer varies, you have an underuse problem. One agreed structure clears it quickly.

Try one Copilot prompt this week. Pick the task your team finds most time-consuming. Evaluate the output against the time it saved — not against perfection.

Share what you found with your team. Not as a directive — as a discovery. "I tried this and it saved me 20 minutes. What have you found?" That conversation is where the drain starts to clear.

Ready to clear this drain?

A 20-minute conversation to identify the practical fixes for your tools — built around what you already own.

I invite you to join me in a 20-minute conversation