Picture this: You’re running a marathon, and you’ve trained for months, but one of your shoes is suddenly filled with pebbles. Your performance suffers, and your personal best time slips away like sand through your fingers. In the business world, unproductive employees can be those pebbles in your shoe. They may not be immediately noticeable, but the impact on your organization’s performance can be serious: the difference between a mediocre quarter and an outstanding one.

That’s happening to many companies across the board: The United States is currently experiencing an unprecedented occurrence, with five straight quarters of year-on-year drops in productivity, as per a study conducted by EY-Parthenon using information from the Federal Bureau of Labor Statistics. This phenomenon has never been recorded in the available data, which dates back to 1948. The shoes of all companies are filled with pebbles now, but so many companies underestimate the costs of these pebbles.