For a long time I’ve been convinced that technology would help us to work better, both individually and collectively, and it’s not for nothing that the historical theme of this blog has been collaboration.
When I look at digital workplaces, where there are almost as many tools as there are needs , I can’t help remembering a time not so long ago when there was email, email and nothing else, and trying to bring in more flexible, less structured collaborative technologies, often enabling user-generated content, resembled an obstacle course with schizophrenic companies who understood the value of new uses, but hoped that the tool would be self-supporting and save them from having to change to create the necessary context for its success (We should not expect an application to work in environments for which its assumptions are not valid).
A way of saying that if today we find normal the myriad of tools that populate our workspaces, it took a long time to get them in, and for a long time we suffered from using a single tool – email – for a host of use cases for which it wasn’t made.
Today, there’s practically one tool for every use, opening the door to intelligent uses: the right tool for the right use, for greater efficiency and less drudgery.
You can’t use technology to solve problems that are human in nature.
So much for theory, because when I look at what’s really going on in companies, I’m horrified by what I see. A veritable cabinet of horrors.
Is this a surprise? No. Collaboration and communication tools are just that, tools, and their use merely reflects ways of behaving, communicating and managing.
My definition of digital is that it enables us to do more, on a larger scale.
When we apply it to bad practices, even dysfunctional practices from a human, managerial, operational and collaborative point of view , we only dysfunction more and on a larger scale, and the intensive use of these tools during the forced teleworking phase imposed by COVID didn’t create new problems but, on the contrary, amplified and made visible problems that already existed in the office (Remote work: a mirror of the organizations’ weaknesses.).
And that’s exactly what we’re seeing today (Collaborative tools in the workplace: a real waste?).
Well-being and performance: the double whammy!
For too long, companies have looked at the subject from a distance, thinking that, in the end, it was the employees’ problem: they are given tools, they use them well or badly, and it’s their problem as long as they do their job.
This is an irresponsible attitude, as it penalizes them in two ways: on the one hand, through a loss of productivity and efficiency, and on the other, by damaging the health of their employees through an increase in cognitive and mental workload.
Let’s make no mistake: we’re dealing with a scourge and perhaps the evil of the century for companies, no matter how you look at it.
This was highlighted in a study by Lecko over a year ago (Why your Digital Workplace is hurting your organization’s performance), but while I congratulate them on having taken up their pilgrim’s staff to evangelize on the subject, I was afraid that they were preaching in the desert, with the vast majority of companies saying “yes, it’s interesting, but there’s nothing we can do about it”.
So it was with interest that I saw the emergence of another initiative along the same lines: the Observatoire de l’Infobesité et de la collaboration numérique (Infobesity and Digital Collaboration Observatory).
A cabinet of horrors
Reading the 2024 referential from the Observatoire de l’Infobesité et de la collaboration numérique inspired two feelings in me.
1°) My impression was right.
2°) It’s really worse than I thought.
On every slide of this study, based on the analysis of 106 million emails and 3 million meeting metadata from 10,000 employees, managers and executives , there are a number of figures that show the scale of the problem.
In fact, this is one of the great merits I can give it credit for: it’s factual, easy to understand and not wordy. The downside is that the slides give the impression of a long descent into hell, with no decompression stop to catch your breath.
I’ll get straight to the point here, but I’ll come back to some of the key points in specific articles later on.
Infobesity: an underestimated reality
Infobesity, as digital information overload, has become a major problem for modern organizations. It affects not only employees’ mental health, but also their productivity and the quality of their professional relationships.
It is the result of several factors:
- Emails: the massive use of email as the main communication channel, often poorly targeted (too many people copied) or redundant. For example, a large proportion of emails are copied to numerous people to ensure traceability of exchanges or for fear of “missing something” (FOMO syndrome).
- Meetings: The multiplication of meetings, often long and redundant, adds to this overload. The report indicates that employees, managers and executives spend a significant proportion of their working time in meetings, with whole days devoted to them, sometimes with no time to concentrate on productive tasks.
- Chat and collaborative tools: Although their adoption is still moderate, chat tools and collaborative platforms like Microsoft Teams add another level of cognitive overload. Incessant notifications disrupt concentration and foster a culture of frequent interruptions.
- Hyper-connectivity: The rise of remote working, smartphone use, and after-hours work habits have exacerbated the tendency to be constantly connected, making it difficult to disconnect mentally.
And, as I said earlier, we can’t just say “they’re misusing their tools, too bad for them”, because the price to pay is enormous for both the employee and the company:
Impact on mental health:
- The stress of managing large volumes of information, combined with the pressure to respond quickly to emails, is detrimental to employee well-being.
- Hyper-connection pushes many employees and managers to work outside office hours, affecting their work-life balance. For example, 52% of managers send emails at the weekend.
No surprise here:In the future of work the mental load is the new workload.
Impact on productivity:
- Infobesity directly affects concentration and the ability to perform tasks efficiently. Time spent on e-mails and meetings considerably reduces the time available for high value-added activities.
- The report shows that executives, who are the most affected, devote a disproportionate amount of their time to meetings and email management, leaving little time for strategic thinking and production.
Relational and managerial impact:
- Information overload also disrupts working relationships. Communication often becomes less qualitative, and digital exchanges can lack clarity, hindering collaboration.
- The multiplication of communication channels and digital tools creates a “communication layered complexity” where the same information is duplicated on several platforms, further increasing confusion and inefficiency.
So once again, we’re talking not just about tools, but also about the urgent need to finally look at the organization of work for knowledge workers (Organizing knowledge work is solving a lot of problems at once).
Digital collaboration: we have the tools, but not the uses
As I said earlier, we have all the tools we need, but we don’t do anything with them.
We’re a long way from “one need = one channel”.
Emails: The volume of emails exchanged varies according to hierarchical level:
- An employee receives an average of 104 e-mails per week and sends 30.
- A manager receives 205 emails and sends 64.
- An executive receives 342 emails and sends 100.
These figures highlight a digital communication overload that particularly affects managers and executives, especially internally.
Meetings:
- Employees spend an average of 6 hours 47 minutes a week in meetings.
- Managers, 14:52 per week.
- Executives, around 25h28 per week. Executives can spend up to 32 days a year in a “meeting tunnel” (days with more than 6 hours of meetings).
A significant proportion of emails are sent during meetings, especially among managers (14% of their emails are sent during meetings) and executives (22%).
Collaborative tools:
- Use of chat rooms remains moderate : 52% of employees use them little (on a monthly basis) and 41% don’t use them at all.
- Collaborative groups are also little used: 74% of employees never use these tools, which limits horizontal exchanges.
We’ve been fighting for years to have tools that free us from having to put up with mailing lists, especially for “bottles to the sea”, and today they represent 17% of messages received!
As for the rest, we’ll talk later about the fact that the higher a person is in the hierarchy, or the more expert they are, the more likely they are to become a risk for the company, a “single point of failure ”, constituting a bottleneck that blocks everything below them through lack of time and attention.
Uses that reveal problems of organization, management and personal organization
If we go into the details, things aren’t exactly rosy, and confirm what I said in my introduction:
The report includes quantitative data on the use of e-mail, meetings and other digital collaboration tools. Here are the main results:
- Email volume:
- The majority of emails exchanged are with internal colleagues (55% of emails for employees, 76% for managers).
- A small proportion of emails (4%) are forwarded, but these represent 15% of the overall volume of emails sent, suggesting frequent use of “umbrella” emails (emails with more than 5 people copied).
- Time spent in meetings:
- Employees spend around 10h48 per week in meetings.
- 26% of meetings are scheduled at the last minute, resulting in organizational overload.
- On average, meetings include 3.4 participants, but 10% of meetings attended by employees overlap.
- Hyper-connectivity and reactivity:
- 15% of employees respond to more than 35% of their emails in less than 5 minutes, reflecting a culture of urgency and excessive responsiveness.
- The management of emails outside working hours is a cause for concern: 7% of employees and 52% of managers regularly send emails in the evening or at weekends.
These data reveal an intense digital work rhythm, marked by email and meeting overload, which affects employees’ efficiency and quality of life.
SOS Workplace Wellbeing!
If managers and line managers are dismayed by the figures above, which put data on perceptions and show all the wasted energy that impacts on individual and collective performance, the section that follows should show HR that they are not all white in the story and have allowed destructive QWL practices to develop.
The report includes quantitative data on the use of email, meetings, and other digital collaboration tools. Here are the main findings:
- Digital workload:
- Email management consumes a significant proportion of working time: employees spend 3 hours 14 minutes a week dealing with emails, while managers spend 10 hours 45 minutes a week.
- At the same time, meetings take up a large proportion of available time: executives, for example, have only 17% of their working time left to concentrate on individual production tasks.
- Hyper-reactivity and stress:
- The culture of reactivity (responding to e-mails within minutes of receipt) is a source of stress and contributes to mental overload.
- Intensive use of emails and meetings reduces the time devoted to high value-added activities and concentration, which can create a feeling of exhaustion and loss of control over one’s work.
- Hyper-connection:
- Hyper-connexion is a recurring problem, particularly among executives, 52% of whom work at weekends and 35% outside normal working hours.
- Employees are also affected, with 7% reconnecting during evenings and weekends.
The report highlights the need to regulate digital practices to avoid adverse effects on employees’ mental health and quality of life, while improving time management and productivity.
This is consistent with other figures I’ve reported in the past (How to Manage Complexity without Getting Complicated), as we are indeed dealing with a consequence of organizational complication (The organizational complication: the #1 irritant of the employee experience):
– Managers in the top quintile of the most complicated organizations spend over 40% of their time writing reports, and 30-60% in coordination meetings .
– In the most complicated organizations, teams spend between 40% and 80% of their time wasting it, not because they’re doing nothing, but because they’re doing unproductive things.
– Over the last 15 years, the number of interface, coordination and control process structures has increased by between 50 and 350%.
Bottom line
As long as we’re talking about invisible workflows, companies have always tended to sweep the dust under the carpet, saying that “since we can’t see it, let’s pretend it doesn’t exist” (The open space is not a factory but sometimes you should look at it that way).
However, we no longer have the right to act as if we were blind: this study and those by Lecko show that we have the data to understand the work of knowledge workers, for better or for worse (The quantified organization: Grail or Big Brother?), and we can no longer tolerate this population being left out when it comes to improving work practices (Knowledge workers, the excluded from operational excellence?).
I’ll come back to the content of this reference framework in more detail in the future.
