The Digital Workplace Productivity Report 2021

All individuals who participated in this survey work at organizations ranging in size from 10 – 500 that have wholly or partly moved to digital work. The 100 respondents who participated were knowledge workers spread across North America. All of them used some form of a digital workplace to collaborate with their colleagues and transact work on a daily basis.

 

Some of the key takeaways from the data we gleaned through the survey:

Too many tools are a way bigger problem than you’d think.

What would you think about hopping between half a dozen different apps to accomplish one task? Nearly 44.3% of respondents surveyed confirmed that more tools complicate their work lives. The rest were split between excessive notifications, too many meetings and interestingly, all of the above formed a significant chunk at 23.7%.

Emails might be boring, but they’re certainly not dead.

As much as they’re despised as a monolithic collaboration nightmare, an interesting finding in the survey was that emails are still the most popular tool when it comes to digital work. Nearly 82.9% of those surveyed reported emails to be an indispensable part of digital work while other work collaboration tools came in at 10.5%.

If more tools are the problem, then the numbers matter.

How big of a problem are more tools when you build a digital workplace? One of the core findings from the survey point to a large number of organizations, nearly 84.2%, using less than half a dozen applications for digital work. The ones with bigger problems were those that used up to 10 applications for work. On the bright side, that’s only 15.8% of organizations worldwide.

Chasing productivity can be hard. Here’s a tip to finding it.

Tools, and more tools complicate work. They’re the most blamed cause in losses of productivity at 55.3%. However, there were more interesting findings. Almost 43.4% of respondents said productivity would gain a huge boost if meetings became more concise and efficient. Other findings were a tilt towards “no meeting” days and lesser chat.

The most hated thing about digital work isn’t surprising at all.

In digital workplace ecosystems, information is power. However, 51.3% of respondents who worked at a digital workplace report that finding the information they need to accomplish their work is a big problem. Uncomplicating the search process and creating a more streamlined path to information is a pressing need. Interestingly, switching tabs and replying to emails were also equally despised. However, meetings ranked lowest on the list of things that needed to go.

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