How Successful Companies are Revolutionizing Internal Collaboration to Boost Profits and Retention
By Tomas Gorny, co-founder and CEO, Nextiva
Just as businesses need to transform customer engagement in this new era, they also need to do the same for internal communications among staff. It’s essential for stemming losses, attracting and retaining top talent, and boosting profits.
Whether employees are fully remote, hybrid, or back in the office, there's a very high probability that they’re grappling with a problem that grew during the pandemic: app sprawl. “Technology is supposed to help workers achieve greater productivity, but the opposite has often been the case since the start of the pandemic,” ITProPortal reports, citing a survey from Citrix. “Instead of being more productive and happy in their work, employees have grown frustrated.” Two-thirds of workers are using more communication and collaboration tools now, and 71% say it has made work more complex.
I’ve been tracking this problem since 2014. The growth in available tools and over reliance on standalone apps has been making it increasingly difficult for people to streamline their work. In 2017, Fortune warned of “app fatigue.”
Then came the pandemic. Faced with a suddenly scattered workforce, businesses quickly took on all sorts of additional online platforms as part of their daily operations. “Usage of productivity apps like Teams, Slack, and Zoom soared,” a Fast Company column noted.
There were upsides to doing so, and employees say access to these tools has helped them communicate with colleagues and collaborate. But because these apps are siloed off from each other, they become a giant mess of separate threads that people have to search through in order to find important information.
U.S. workers have been switching among a whopping 13 different apps 30 times a day on average, cutting back on their efficiency. It’s one of the major drivers of context switching, which is also shown to increase stress. This kind of organizational dysfunction reflects an outmoded approach to enterprise IT management.
Centering conversations
As I see it, businesses are often communicating more these days but connecting less. What they need in order to fix this problem is a paradigm shift. It’s time to make conversations the centerpiece of how organizations work and collaborate, both internally and externally.
Until recently, there was a lack of solutions to this problem in the marketplace. Without thinking about consequences, companies have been buying one product at a time, with no way to connect them all.
CRMs (customer relationship management tools) have been serving as the hub of internal operations. They certainly continue to have a role. But they don’t provide a way to turn all conversations on a topic, both internally and externally, across numerous platforms, into a single view.
New technologies, known as work hubs, allow this to happen. Conversations can be merged into one thread no matter where and how they took place. These files can also be enriched with other relevant information that anyone in the conversation wants to add to it. This enables unprecedented collaboration, and breaks down silos.
Adopting such a system will soon be a necessity -- especially for businesses looking to keep up with the tech giants. As Aragon Research put it in a study, “The combination of better digital work hubs combined with savvy business leadership means there will be more demand for an integrated work environment.”
Attraction and retention
These hubs do more than improve performance. They can also go a long way toward retaining employees.
The problem of having too many apps can drive employees away. Bloomberg Law reported in 2018 that more than half of workers say they’re overwhelmed and felt pressured to use multiple platforms; one in three were ready to quit because they were “stressed out by poor communication in the workplace,” and a general sense of chaos was leading increasing numbers of employees to want to quit.
And just a year ago, the Society for Human Resource Management cautioned that, “Using so many apps for the same purpose not only leads to problems in hosting and attending meetings, but also can bring about workplace confusion and disgruntled employees.”
The latest strong jobs figures, with historically low unemployment, show that the “great resignation” remains firmly in place. Businesses can’t afford to lose top-notch talent -- and have every reason to invest in providing the working environments and tools that employees seek.
As investors look for which businesses to bet on, they have every reason to explore what systems these organizations have in place, and how they’re updating their technologies. The most promising companies of the future will be those that embrace the opportunity.
Tomas Gorny is co-founder and CEO of Nextiva, a Connected Communications company.
The views and opinions expressed herein are the views and opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Nasdaq, Inc.