Employees express love-hate relationship with workplace collaboration

A report released by Unify Square, “Digital Workplace Collaboration Apps Report: Benchmarking Usage and Productivity” examines the most utilised features across both unified communication and workstream collaboration application platforms, application usage trends and how they are impacting productivity, employee behaviour, security and more. The report suggests how digital workplace collaboration applications impact the success of today’s enterprises.

As collaboration application platforms continue to infiltrate organisations in every industry, email still maintains a key role in day-to-day business communications. Employees across the board, regardless of age/level/work schedule, agree that 66 percent of their colleagues have mastered the art of effectively balancing the use of both email and collaboration applications.

Forty percent of enterprise workers agreed that one of the chief benefits of collaboration applications is fewer emails, yet 74 percent say they have not seen any significant decrease in the quantity of emails they receive since starting to use these collaboration applications.

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With the implementation of workplace collaboration apps comes increased distractions for end users. The survey results claim that enterprise employees aren’t denying their responsibility in distraction at work, with 43 percent believing that preventing distraction caused by collaboration applications is a shared responsibility between themselves and management.

Personal conversations (41 percent) and incoming requests taking away from current projects (39 percent) were noted as the biggest culprits for distraction caused by collaboration applications during the workday.

Contrary to popular belief, enterprise employees crave structure and strict guidelines from management when it comes to the use of collaboration applications. In fact, 40 percent of enterprise employees wish their organisations enforced stricter rules around collaboration application usage. Nearly 60 percent of respondents believe that stricter rules would help improve work-life balance, and 42 percent believe a more enforced set of rules would help set expectations on usage for employees.

The survey claims that employees working in high-tech industry companies are the least likely to let IT know about their app usage than any other industry, with nearly 40 percent admitted to downloading collaboration apps for personal use without IT’s approval. Conversely, of the respondents working in consumer-packaged goods companies, over 90 percent say they have never downloaded collaboration applications without ITs approval.

Perhaps, most importantly, when it comes to making sure that collaboration applications are secure, over 60 percent believe the responsibility of securing collaboration apps should lie solely on their organisation’s IT department.

Read the full report here.

Image by MetsikGarden