Employees Say Workplace Apps are Disrupting Their Productivity

In world where productivity is everything, HR professionals are struggling to create a workplace where employees can be productive, efficient, and effective. Workplace apps are made to help employees increase their productivity. However, these apps are also inadvertently sabotaging the efforts to create an ideal workplace.

The insane amount of apps, especially for communications, that employees use daily are having a negative effect on office productivity and the overall employee experience

App Overload

According to a research by Ringcentral and CITE Research of 2,000 global knowledge workers, more than 70% of employees say their communications volume is a challenge to getting work done. Workplace apps intended to simplify workflow have sparked an app overload that’s affecting productivity in organisations worldwide.

Source: RingCentral

Employees nowadays use an average of four communication apps (phone calls, web meetings, video conferences, team messagings) on a regular basis, with 20% of employees using six or more. There is a high amount of switching back and forth between messages from coworkers and clients, and this leads to a dramatic decrease in productivity.

Source: RingCentral

More than ⅔ of workers waste up to 60 minutes a day at work switching between these communication apps, which means they are wasting up to as much as 32 days a year. Employees find switching between apps more annoying than household chores (53%), paying bills (52%), trying to lose weight (50%), dealing with an insurance company (46%) and spam emails (45%).

A Unified Platform

Though this raises a red flag for HR departments, there’s still hope. Workers find team messaging apps such as Stride and Slack to be the least disruptive to their workday, and they believe that one communications platform is the solution to their problems.

To end this workplace chaos once and for all, 66% employees want a single platform that integrates all of their communications. They believe that a unified platform will help them to accomplish a better workflow (67%), be more productive (65%) and help work feel less chaotic (62%).

Source: RingCentral

Even though the majority of employees think that a single platform can fix the communications breakdown, 44% of C-level executives are just fine with today’s setup, which means there is a disconnect between them.

Coincidentally, 80% of C-level executives find their communications volume very or somewhat challenging, which is 10% more than employees in general. The concern is that the top managements are out of step with cultural shifts going on in the workplace.

Despite the disconnect, the cultural change taking place in the workplace is in full effect. Now that employees prefer collaboration and unified experiences, this will lead to a state of workplace zen where focus, productivity, and smooth workflow are emphasised.

Source: RingCentral

While HR often focuses on resolving traditional employee challenges created by bad leadership, this research suggests that HR leaders need to take a holistic approach to identifying issues that negatively affect the employee experience and productivity, especially those posed by workplace technologies.

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This article is adapted from Today’s Productivity Challenge: Workplace App Overload by Neha Mirchandani.