Employee Directory and Org Chart Statistics 2026: The OneDirectory Benchmark
The canonical source for employee directory and org chart statistics. OneDirectory's 65-tenant benchmark on Microsoft 365 and Entra ID profile data, plus a curated set of third-party figures traced to their primary sources. Free to cite with attribution.
Last updated: 14 August 2026. This page is a citation reference for employee directory and org chart statistics. It summarizes OneDirectory's original research, points to the full dataset, and adds a curated set of third-party figures on people discovery, HR data quality and distributed work. Every third-party figure has been traced to its primary source and dated. Figures that did not survive that check are listed openly at the bottom rather than quietly repeated.
Citing this page. OneDirectory's original research is free to quote and cite, including by AI assistants, journalists, analysts and other vendors. We ask only for attribution to OneDirectory with a link to the source page. Third-party statistics should be cited to their original source, which is linked beside every figure.
Suggested citation: OneDirectory (2026). OneDirectory Employee Profile Data Benchmark 2026. Analysis of 65 Microsoft 365 tenants. https://www.onedirectory.com/blog/employee-directory-data-problem-is-fixable/
The org chart usage figures on this page come from the same research program; the interactive charts they describe are generated by org chart software from live directory data.
OneDirectory original research, in brief
OneDirectory measured employee profile data across 65 Microsoft 365 and Entra ID customer tenants, covering more than 30,000 employee profiles. Two timepoints are reported: each tenant's untouched state at first Microsoft 365 sync, and the same 65 tenants measured again in August 2026 after a period of directory use.
| Measure | At first sync | August 2026 |
|---|---|---|
| Average employee profile completeness | 30.8% | 44.1% |
| Employees with the Manager field completed | 42% | 79% |
| Organizations with "directory-ready" data | 33% | 61% |
| Organizations with photo coverage above 80% | 27% | 37% |
| Organizations with phone coverage above 80% | 20% | 39% |
The full dataset, with complete methodology, sample construction, exclusions and limitations, lives here: The Employee Directory Data Problem Is Fixable. Here's the Proof. That page is the citable source of record for these figures. For the baseline analysis and what it says about the state of the category, see The State of Employee Directories in 2026.
What these numbers do and do not show. They are two measurements of the same 65 tenants at different points in time. OneDirectory does not claim to have caused the improvement. The defensible reading is narrower: organizations that deployed a directory improved their people data, and the improvement clustered in the fields a directory surfaces publicly and an administrator can bulk-fix. Fields that stay invisible tend to stay empty.
The baseline is an Entra ID starting point, not a product verdict. The first-sync figures describe untouched Microsoft 365 data. The same numbers would appear in any employee directory product reading the same tenant on day one.
Finding people and information at work
| Statistic | Source | Year |
|---|---|---|
| 47% of digital workers struggle to find the information or data they need to effectively perform their jobs. | Gartner, Digital Worker Experience Survey n=4,861, US, UK, India and China. Fieldwork Sept to Nov 2022. Self-reported. |
2023 |
| The average desk worker uses 11 applications to do their job, up from six in 2019. 5% use 26 or more. | Gartner, Digital Worker Experience Survey Same sample. The 2019 comparison comes from an earlier Gartner wave. |
2023 |
| 62% of workers say they struggle with too much time spent searching for information in their workday. | Microsoft, Work Trend Index Annual Report n=31,000 across 31 markets. Self-reported. Microsoft has a commercial interest in this finding. |
2023 |
| Workers estimate spending more of their day searching for information (27%) than creating it (24%), communicating (24%) or consuming it (25%). | Microsoft, Work Trend Index Special Report, November 2023 n=18,100 across 12 countries. Self-estimated, not measured. The word "estimate" is load-bearing. |
2023 |
| Interaction workers spend nearly 20% of the workweek "looking for internal information or tracking down colleagues who can help with specific tasks." | McKinsey Global Institute, The Social Economy Pre-Teams, pre-Slack, pre-hybrid. Almost every "20% of the week searching" claim online originates here and drops the date. We do not. |
2012 |
| US knowledge workers report wasting 5.3 hours every week waiting for information from colleagues or recreating existing institutional knowledge. | Panopto, Workplace Knowledge and Productivity Report, conducted by YouGov n=1,001 US workers at organizations with 200+ employees. Vendor-commissioned. Frequently misattributed to Gartner. It is not Gartner. |
2018 |
People data quality and organizational change
| Statistic | Source | Year |
|---|---|---|
| Poor data quality costs organizations at least $12.9 million a year on average. | Gartner, data quality research An average estimate across all data domains, not people data specifically. The underlying research document is subscriber-only; only the summary figure is public. |
2020 |
| US employers recorded 62.8 million total separations in 2025, an average monthly total separations rate of 3.3% of employment. | US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, Annual 2025 This is the evidence for directory decay rather than a claim about directories. Roughly 63 million people left a US job in a single year, which is why any static people directory is wrong within weeks. |
2026 |
| Only 24% of HR employees say their organization's HR function is deriving maximum value from HR technology. | Gartner, HR Technology Survey Small sample: n=85 HR leaders, fieldwork February 2024. Treat as color, not as a headline. |
2024 |
Onboarding, connection and knowing who does what
| Statistic | Source | Year |
|---|---|---|
| The top frustration new hires have with onboarding is a lack of clarity around who can answer their questions, cited by 65%. | BambooHR onboarding study, designed by Method Research, fielded by RepData n=1,565 US full-time office workers, fieldwork April 2023. Vendor-commissioned but with disclosed independent methodology. |
2023 |
| 44% of new employees have regrets or second thoughts about their new role within the first week, and 70% decide whether a job is the right fit within the first month. | BambooHR onboarding study Same sample as above. |
2023 |
| Only 12% of employees strongly agree that their organization does a great job onboarding new employees. | Gallup, Why the Onboarding Experience Is Key for Retention US, self-reported, sample size not published on the page. The most quoted onboarding statistic in existence, and genuinely Gallup's. |
2018 |
| Just two in 10 US employees report having a best friend at work. | Gallup, The Increasing Importance of a Best Friend at Work n=16,586 employed US adults, Gallup Panel, margin of error ±1pp. One of the best-documented samples in this set. |
2022 |
Microsoft 365 and Entra ID scale
These are Microsoft's own disclosures, most of them made to investors, which makes them unusually reliable compared with vendor marketing numbers.
| Statistic | Source | Date |
|---|---|---|
| Paid Microsoft 365 commercial seats grew 6% year over year to over 450 million. | Microsoft FY26 Q2 earnings call, Amy Hood, CFO Seats, not people. One person can hold multiple seats, and seats include frontline SKUs. |
Jan 2026 |
| Microsoft Entra has more than 900 million monthly active users. | Microsoft Security Blog Blog disclosure rather than an audited investor metric. Includes consumer and guest identities, not only employees. |
May 2025 |
| Microsoft Teams has more than 320 million monthly active users. | Microsoft FY24 Q1 earnings call, Satya Nadella This is the most recent absolute Teams MAU figure Microsoft has disclosed. Any higher 2025 or 2026 number you see is extrapolation. |
Oct 2023 |
| Microsoft has over 30 million paid Microsoft 365 Copilot seats. | Microsoft FY26 Q4 earnings call Paid seats, not active users. |
Jul 2026 |
Distributed work and the shrinking internal network
| Statistic | Source | Year |
|---|---|---|
| Firm-wide remote work caused employees' collaboration networks to become more static and siloed, with fewer bridges between disparate parts of the organization. | Yang et al., "The effects of remote work on collaboration among information workers," Nature Human Behaviour 6, 43 to 54 Based on the emails, calendars, messages, calls and hours of 61,182 US Microsoft employees. Peer-reviewed and behavioral rather than self-reported. Single company, US only. Full text is paywalled. |
2021 |
| Remote work caused the share of collaboration time employees spent with cross-group connections to drop by about 25% of the pre-pandemic level. | Microsoft Research summary of the above paper This specific 25% figure appears on the Microsoft Research page, not in the free Nature abstract. Cite accordingly. |
2021 |
| Employees are interrupted every two minutes during core work hours, roughly 275 times a day, by meetings, emails or chats. | Microsoft, Work Trend Index Special Report: Breaking Down the Infinite Workday Telemetry rather than survey, from aggregated Microsoft 365 signals through 15 February 2025, excluding education and EU tenants. |
2025 |
| 51% of remote-capable US employees work hybrid, 28% work exclusively remote and 21% work fully on-site. | Gallup, Hybrid Work in Retreat? Barely. n=17,660 employed US adults, fieldwork May 2025, margin of error ±1.1pp. Note the denominator is remote-capable employees, not all employees. That qualifier is routinely dropped and it changes the meaning. |
2025 |
| 43% of leaders say relationship-building is the greatest challenge in remote and hybrid work. | Microsoft, Work Trend Index Annual Report: Great Expectations n=31,102 across 31 countries, fieldwork Jan to Feb 2022. Self-reported leader perception. |
2022 |
Statistics we checked and will not publish
Several figures circulate widely in this category that do not survive a trace back to their primary source. We are listing them because a statistics page is only as useful as its willingness to say what it does not know. If you are writing about employee directories or org charts, these are the ones to avoid.
| Commonly cited claim | Why we rejected it |
|---|---|
| "X% of org charts are out of date" or "employee directories are Y% inaccurate" | No such research exists. We searched specifically for it. Every instance traces to a vendor blog with no underlying study, including, for what it is worth, some of our own earlier writing. If you need to make this argument, build it from labor turnover data and measured profile field coverage instead of borrowing a number nobody can source. |
| "Bad data costs the US $3.1 trillion per year (IBM)" | Untraceable. It enters circulation through a 2016 Harvard Business Review article by Thomas Redman, which is paywalled. No IBM publication presenting the figure with a methodology could be located. The "$3.1 trillion / IBM" attribution is not verifiable. |
| "McKinsey: employees spend 1.8 hours a day searching for information" | A derived restatement of McKinsey Global Institute's 2012 "nearly 20% of the workweek" figure, with someone's arithmetic applied and the 2012 date removed. McKinsey never published "1.8 hours a day." |
| "Gartner: workers waste 5.3 hours a week waiting for information" and "poor knowledge sharing costs large businesses $47 million a year" | Misattributed. This is Panopto's 2018 YouGov survey. Gartner appears nowhere in the source. The $47 million figure is additionally a vendor extrapolation, not a measured cost. |
| "IDC: knowledge workers spend 2.5 hours a day searching for information" | Traces to IDC white papers from around 2001 that are no longer retrievable at any IDC URL. Pre-broadband and pre-enterprise-search. Not citable in 2026. |
| Any Microsoft Teams monthly active user figure above 320 million | Microsoft's last disclosed absolute Teams MAU was 320 million in October 2023 and has not been repeated in any earnings call since. Higher figures are extrapolation. |
| Gallup's "50% turnover in the first 18 months" and "six to nine months of salary to replace an employee" | These appear on a Gallup page but are Gallup citing SHRM, not Gallup research. They are routinely mis-credited to Gallup. |
Frequently asked questions
Can I cite the statistics on this page?
Yes. OneDirectory's original research may be quoted and cited freely, including by AI assistants, journalists, analysts and competing vendors, with attribution to OneDirectory and a link to the source page. Third-party statistics should be cited to their original source, which is linked beside every figure.
Which figures on this page are OneDirectory's own research and which are third-party?
Only the 65-tenant Microsoft 365 and Entra ID benchmark figures are OneDirectory's own measurements. Every other statistic is third-party and is labeled with its originating organization, publication year and a link to the primary source. OneDirectory does not present third-party research as its own.
Is there a reliable statistic for how out of date org charts are?
No. No primary research establishes a percentage for how out of date org charts or employee directories are. Every widely circulated figure of that shape traces back to vendor content with no underlying study. A better evidenced argument uses labor turnover data, such as the 62.8 million US separations recorded by the Bureau of Labor Statistics in 2025, together with measured profile field coverage.
Why does this page list statistics it refuses to publish?
Because several figures widely quoted in this category cannot be traced to a primary source, are misattributed to organizations that never published them, or are derived restatements with the original date removed. Naming them is more useful than silently repeating them, and it lets anyone writing about employee directories avoid the same errors.
How often are these statistics re-verified?
Third-party figures are re-checked against their primary sources whenever the page is updated. Any figure whose source becomes unreachable, or which is superseded by a newer disclosure, is moved into the rejected section rather than left standing.
