Stop Blaming Technology for Poor Collaboration and Productivity
In early March, Asana unveiled its fourth annual Anatomy of Work Report, a survey of 9,600 global workers on what's working — and what's not — across organizations.
The report offers interesting insights into today's digital workplace, with collaboration figuring prominently as the key to unlocking growth and efficiencies.
Among the findings: There is evidence that cross-functional collaboration leads to revenue growth, adaptability and business resilience, as 55% of workers at collaborative organizations report revenue growth over the past three years — almost double those with weak collaboration.
But how does an organization achieve good collaboration? According to the report, optimized processes may be the answer.
‘Work about Work’ in the Digital Workplace
Adopting new habits is never easy. It takes time, willpower and discipline. But after three years into the new way of working, companies must come to the realization that some things are simply not working.
According to the Asana report:
- Workers estimate 4.9 hours per week could be saved with improved processes
- Unnecessary meetings account for almost 4 hours per week for leadership roles
- Skilled work only takes up 33% of the workday, with "work-about-work" taking up more than half (58%) of worker’s days
Asana's Head of Global Customer Experience, Neeracha Taychakhoonavudh, said these findings should not surprise anyone, given the number of apps organizations use — an average of 8.8 for knowledge workers, she said. "This is concerning, as more apps equals more missed work."
Taychakhoonavudh says 15% of knowledge workers who use 6 to 15 apps miss messages and actions, and that number rises to 25% for those using 16 apps or more.
There is a lot of time wasted working about work, which Asana defines as "the activities that take time away from meaningful work, including communicating about work, searching for information, switching between apps, managing shifting priorities and chasing the status of work."
In other words, the boring stuff that tends to get morale down among knowledge workers — particularly highly driven employees.
Related Article: Work Smarter and Save Time With a Few Simple Changes
Assessing Your Collaboration Technology Strategy
To tackle inefficient collaboration, companies need to determine how to get the most value out of the investments they make into technology.
The goal of any collaboration technology should be to optimize operational efficiencies and free up employees from meaningless work to focus on high impact work. Simply put: maximize resources.
To achieve this, tech decision-making needs to be expanded further down the organizational chart. The higher the role, the more difficult it becomes to make decisions quickly — and to thoroughly understand the consequences on employees and the work itself.
Managing technology in the digital workplace is critical to effectiveness. As companies realize they have been stockpiling app over app, integrating tools and minimizing redundant cross-functional work has become pressing for many.
To make this possible, leaders must prioritize the most impactful investments and be comfortable opting out of efforts that do not move the needle, even if that means factoring in an adaptation period. Teams that have the right tech to foster cross-functional collaboration will be more productive, Taychakhoonavudh said. “If you and your employees are spending time on work that is not going to drive growth, then those hours are wasted."
Unfortunately, work about work continues to be where workers are spending the majority of their day, Taychakhoonavudh said, and business leaders cannot afford to allow such barriers to stand in the way of effective collaboration.
Related Article: Mastering Asynchronous Collaboration in the Digital Workplace
Enterprise Time-Wasting
While the tech stack is often to blame, the issue of inefficient collaboration isn't confined to the tools used.
Gabriela Mauch, VP of ActivTrak Productivity Lab, said that while we have been talking about these topics for years, organizations have only recently started to recognize the importance of measuring the impact "work about work" has on workforce productivity and employee well-being.
The problem, she said, extends to the enterprise as a whole.
ActivTrak's 2023 State of the Workplace Report, which provides productivity and engagement trends based on a study of nearly 150,000 employees and 1,000 customers, warns of a significant risk of digital overload and burnout due to inadequate technology.
It showed, for example, that employees interacted with 20% more tools, sites and apps in 2022 than they had in the previous year. More specifically:
- Design tools usage was up 18%
- Admin/IT tools usage was up 13%
- Developer tools usage was up 9%
- System processes tools usage was up 5%
According to Mauch, the underlying story in these data points is that the increase in the proliferation in technology has had minimal to no improvement when it comes to focus time. "What this suggests is that technology is not necessarily helping us focus more on our work. In fact, 62% of the workforce average a focus session of less than 30 minutes at a time," she said.
Adding to this, the study found that 28% of employees risked attrition due to disengagement or burnout, 24% were being overutilized and 4% were underutilized.
Related Article: Your Employees Can't Find Information. A Systems Approach Can Help
Learning Opportunities
The Problem With Collaborative Tool-selection
So, are tools really the problem weighing down collaboration and productivity, or is there a bigger issue at play?
Mauch believes inadequate processes are typically at fault — not the technology. "Technology needs to support the right processes," she said. “If that process is not the right process or isn’t properly modified with the introduction of technology, then further confusion and disruption can surface.”
Dan Lawyer, chief product officer at Lucid Software, agrees the technology isn't the problem, though in his view, the tool selection process is the main culprit.
Those who purchase the technology need to be well-aligned with, on one hand, the leadership team setting the goals and, on the other, those employees who will use the technology to accomplish the goals. All must be working toward the same objective.
Yet, some companies are just not supplying their workers with the tools they need to effectively communicate and collaborate and, thus, achieve objectives.
Lawyer said that having all the necessary tools on a single platform can alleviate this problem by streamlining workflows so employees can spend less time figuring out what tools to use and focus on utilizing their strategic skills on items that matter.
Having a central designated hub also helps create a source of truth that people can refer to, which can help employees communicate more clearly and align around.
"With more global, distributed and hybrid teams, businesses need solutions that connect and engage stakeholders from a variety of backgrounds at every stage of their workflow," Lawyer said.
Related Article: How to Help Your Employees Digitally Declutter
The Ongoing Evolution of the Digital Workplace
Hybrid work has become a very popular work model, but lessons are still being learned and growing pains abound.
"[Hybrid work] has done a lot of good, like modernizing many businesses and offering greater flexibility to employees, but it has also significantly increased the amount of tech that employees have to juggle on a daily basis," said Andrew Filev, CEO and founder of Wrike, whose research has shown that important work often falls through the cracks due to limited visibility and collaboration challenges across hybrid organizations.
"We are starting to see the negative effect that too many digital tools can have on the workplace, often hindering rather than helping employees to manage work, creating visibility challenges for management," Filev said.
He, too, acknowledges there is often a management problem behind the technology problem. The way that management evaluates productivity and collaboration has shifted because of hybrid work, placing more reliance on tools and tech, he said.
To solve this, some organizations have turned to surveillance tools, but these often provide a false narrative about what is done during the workday and create serious distrust between management and employees.
The real issue, Filev said, is that management does not have a clear line of sight into how teams are tracking strategic initiatives, what is getting done on a day-to-day basis and who is demonstrating leadership. Business leaders believe they have visibility in 54% of the work taking place, but their workers believe that number is closer to 45%.
This makes investing in the right tools even more critical. Companies need tools that offer them greater visibility and allow teams to consolidate their app usage because when teams are not working in the same physical shared space, it can be difficult to align them on priorities and projects.
Like Lawyer, Fileve believes that having a single source of truth that employees all over the globe can reference will help eliminate redundant work, ensure everyone is working toward shared goals and allow team members in different time zones to easily pick up where their colleagues left off.
"Freeing employees up to focus on their most impactful work is where effective collaboration happens," he said.
About the Author
David is a European-based journalist of 35 years who has spent the last 15 following the development of workplace technologies, from the early days of document management, enterprise content management and content services. Now, with the development of new remote and hybrid work models, he covers the evolution of technologies that enable collaboration, communications and work and has recently spent a great deal of time exploring the far reaches of AI, generative AI and General AI.
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