Feature
Asana’s Work Innovation Lab and Amazon Web Services got some surprising results when they teamed up on an experiment to see whether employees could cut down on collaboration tools in the workplace. In what they dubbed a “collaboration cleanse,” they asked 58 employees from Asana and AWS to report on the collaboration tools they employed, such as Slack, Zoom and Figma, as well as to choose some to refrain from using for two weeks.
The unexpected finding was that the employees felt increasing “digital exhaustion” as the two-week experiment went on, despite culling their collaboration tools by at least one — and in some cases, cutting them down by half.
“We realized that as participants were asked to subtract tools from their tech stack, they became more mindful and conscious of the sheer exhaustion that those technologies were driving for them,” said Rebecca Hinds, the head of Asana’s Work Innovation Lab who helped design the experiment and co-authored an article about it in Harvard Business Review as well as an Asana report about the state of collaboration technology.
“They began to realize that they alone could not optimize their tech stack in the way that they wanted to.”
Many workers find themselves having to use tech tools adopted for others’ purposes, with different tools being required for interacting with various departments or working on particular kinds of tasks.
This, said Paul Leonardi, professor of technology management at University of California Santa Barbara and one of Hinds’ collaborators and co-authors, is why digital exhaustion is about more than simple information overload.
“It's really that all the digital technologies that we use are there for different purposes, and they're conduits for different kinds of information,” he said. “We constantly have to be switching and making choices, and that's exhausting.”
So, is there any hope? We dug and found some tips that can help you and your team.
How to Standardize Your Collaboration Tech Stack
The “collaboration cleanse” and an accompanying survey of 3,004 knowledge workers in the US and UK revealed an important lesson for business leaders: Employees want standardization in their collaboration tools.
“A whopping 74% of knowledge workers are craving more standardization — saying they prefer that everyone in their organization use the same set of core collaboration technologies,” wrote the researchers in the Asana report. Only 40% viewed customization as important in a tool.
There’s a clear imperative for business leaders to streamline company collaboration tech stacks with an eye toward standardization. But just as employees find it difficult to simply stop using a given tool that colleagues depend on, leaders may find it challenging to identify the best way to cull and simplify.
Hinds and Leonardi offered some insight into best practices for doing so:
1. Do a Technology Audit
First, get a handle on which collaboration tools employees are using and how. There are numerous ways to get at this information, but the key goal is to identify which specific features or capabilities each employee or team uses or benefits from most. To be effective, this process must be systematic and organized at the top level of the organization.
“We need some ‘adult supervision,’ if you will, over the tool selection in our organization, but adult supervision that's paying close attention to the needs of our employees,” said Leonardi.
Related Article: Don’t Leave Teamwork to Chance: Why Collaboration Design Matters
2. Design a More Streamlined Tech Stack
Building from the information collected during the audit about what each team values and where those values overlap, business leaders can redesign the company’s tech stack to best serve the most people using the fewest tools.
With standardization as your primary goal, resist calls to retain collaboration tools that serve a single use case. This is an opportunity to push your collaboration tech stack toward the future.
“We're seeing more and more goals within organizations be cross-functional in nature,” said Hinds. “I think we're going to see — and I hope we see — more consideration into what technologies are well-suited for cross-functional use cases versus individual team use cases.”
3. Give Priority to Integration
Streamlined workflows are increasingly vital for competitiveness in business, and the best way to facilitate this is to ensure integration of your systems wherever possible. So, when rethinking your collaboration tools, give preference to technologies that integrate well with each other and with existing systems.
Technologies that operate in silos cause your employees to operate in silos, putting your business at a disadvantage when it comes to knowledge sharing, collaboration, creative synergy and even company culture.
Related Article: Always-On Communications Leaves No Time to Focus
4. Communicate Well to Employees
Clear and transparent communication about the changes in the tech stack, especially the “why” you’re making specific shifts, will increase employees’ willingness to engage with new ways of working and adopt new tools if needed.
Conference
Oct
20
Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo Orlando 2025
Register
Conference
Oct
27
Gartner HR Symposium/Xpo Orlando 2025
Register
Ensuring that employees have feedback into the process is also critical since they are the ones using these tools daily. Still, it is incumbent on leadership to make the final decisions that will facilitate better collaboration across the entire organization.
5. Set up a Robust Approvals Process
Once you’ve rethought your collaboration tech stack to standardize workflows across the company, put controls in place to ensure they don’t proliferate again in the future.
“In my experience, there are at least twice as many tools as the senior leadership thinks that there are floating around the company somewhere,” said Leonardi. “That's because we live in this world now of SaaS, where you don't need a big license, right? You don't need to buy a big, expensive license to bring software into your company.”
Prices for SaaS subscriptions tend to be set (purposefully, noted Leonardi) just below what middle-managers are typically allowed to charge on their company cards. Department heads can often implement a tool in isolation of other departments and without leadership’s knowledge. Preventing this problem typically requires a robust approval process that is coordinated by a single element of leadership, such as the CIO or CTO.
Creating and maintaining a streamlined, standardized tech stack is one of the best things you can do to reduce your employees’ digital exhaustion, jumpstart more collaboration and position your organization for a cross-functional future.
