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We’re all tired of toggling. According to a study from Harvard Business Review, the average employee switches between 35 job-critical applications more than 1,200 times every day. With a seemingly endless number of digital workplace vendors in the market and the shift to remote and hybrid work, many organizations have ended up with overstuffed tech stacks.
While obviously a burden on operating budgets, the digital friction it creates also has clear consequences for productivity, which compounds the revenue loss. Is it time for digital workplace leaders to take a closer look at what they really need, and what they don’t?
App Bloat vs. Healthy Clutter
Digital workplace tools exploded in popularity during the pandemic as employers looked to close the gaps created by remote working. However, the solutions purchased in haste have since evolved or grown irrelevant.
“We also upgraded a lot of things in 2020 and now three years later, we're going to be upgrading that again,” said Andrew Hewitt, principal analyst at Forrester. “We're also seeing either rise of new types of capabilities like generative AI, which are adding even more complexity into the overall environment.”
According to Christopher Lind, chief learning officer at ChenMed, app bloat isn’t always a result of useless or unhelpful tools in the workplace — in some cases, these tools are still value-adds.
“It's in some ways healthy clutter because people are solving real problems within their teams in their organizations,” he said. “But it is leading to fatigue for people because they don't have the context for any of this stuff.”
In some cases, the blame lies with both vendors and their clients, Lind explained, as many leaders lack technical acumen and vendors tend to over-promise during the proposal process.
“As a result it looks like they do everything, but it doesn't really or it's not really very good at much of that,” Lind said.
Beyond the annoyance of app-switching, a large tech stack also opens organizations up to additional security risks, according to Hewitt.
“The fundamental challenge is that when people moved remotely, you moved from locking everything down in a corporate data center to everything being dispersed,” Hewitt said. “When you have that level of complexity, it is not impossible to secure or manage, but it's definitely harder.”
Related Article: How to Help Your Employees Digitally Declutter
Who’s Your Auditor?
Whose job should it be to undertake the audit?
“It is tough because you need someone who understands business, technology and people. That kind of trilingual person is hard to find,” Lind said.
He added that while this is the kind of “critical C-Suite role” that companies need to build in-house, for many organizations, it makes more sense to bring in a third-party expert who can look at your company’s situation holistically and tell you where you should consolidate and where you shouldn't.
According to Hewitt, this underscores the importance of having a digital employee experience (DEX) team.
“What I'm seeing increasingly is DEX teams that are doing a lot of the work around understanding what's actively being used and how employees feel about the applications that they're using,” he said. “They’re doing a lot of that research to understand where those overlapping areas are where maybe we could streamline that into a single app.”
Questions to Ask
Once you’ve established who should be responsible for assessing your current stack of tools and solutions, companies should ask themselves the following questions during an audit:
Is this junk? Lind said this is particularly useful for tools invested in during the pandemic that no longer have a purpose but are still in the system.
How often do we use it? Understanding whether tools or apps are used on a daily, weekly, monthly or even less frequently can lay the groundwork by establishing what your environment looks like, Hewitt said.
What’s the business case? Hewitt said this requires collecting feedback from employees to understand which applications they find mission-critical, regardless of how often they use it.
What are we trying to accomplish? Companies need to understand what results they’re trying to drive with a certain technology or tool and whether it’s really furthering that goal, Lind explained.
What does the product roadmap look like? With many vendors now investing in AI capabilities, Lind said it’s important to make sure any new assistants or bots actually add value.
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What are the dependencies of the app? You also want to look at the dependency mapping, Hewitt explained, to understand whether removing a particular application would actually make it harder for people to use other apps that may be in the environment.
Related Article: Digital Tools Only Work if Your Employees Know How to Use Them
To Cut or Keep?
While utilization rates of different tools can be helpful to indicate what might be worth cutting, it’s not always as simple as that.
“Maybe you could cut it, but have you really vetted it?” Lind said. “Does it have the potential to fill an unmet need? It's already in the ecosystem, and it’s a heck of a lot easier to use something that's already there than it is to bring something new.”
Companies also need to decide whether they want to take a platform or point solution approach to their digital workplace.
“This is a major topic of debate today in the industry: how much of this can I get from a single vendor and how much of it do I want to actually source a Best-in-Class solution for?” Hewitt said. While many companies continue to partner with large vendors like Microsoft or Google to knock out most of their digital workplace needs, there are third-party tools that may be worth the investment instead.
“We want people to use the tools that we already have primarily for cost reasons,” Hewitt said. “But If you're running into a situation where despite all the training and communication that you've done, people are still using this third party application and they still find that to be more useful, that's when it makes sense to keep that third party tool.”
Lind advised people to keep in mind that you can’t fix your whole digital ecosystem overnight, so set expectations with leadership and your team that such a project could take upwards of a year to even make a sizable dent.
“A lot of times people don't like delayed gratification,” Lind said. “But just take it one step at a time.”
