Long gone are the days of the monotonous intranet, which served little purpose for its users but satisfied the business’s need for communication.
Today, despite all the reluctance, the promise of the digital Workplace has been fulfilled: there is a real digital environment in which employees can live their lives within the company.
The digital workplace is now a reality
By living your life, I mean doing your job, managing the administrative aspects of your life in the company, communicating, collaborating and socializing.
It may be obvious to you, but I remember a time when I’d hear “we’re not going to give email addresses to everyone! can you imagine if they started writing to their superiors? “then “it’s out of the question for an employee to publish anything without a prior validation circuit”. Mind you, at the same time we also heard “Saas? That’s out of the question”.
In short, today we’re talking about a $48.81 billion market by 2024 (Digital Workplace Market Size & Trends).
Anyway.
The digital workplace has thus developed in a more or less orderly fashion, but fortunately (or not) the concentration of the market around a few players has enabled a relatively coherent development.
But this was without taking into account two factors.
Employees’ appetite for shadow IT
Software vendors are improving their offer, businesses have understood that the consumerization of work tools is inevitable, and SaaS reduces deployment times, but the fact remains that employees are still people who, in their personal lives, have their own little habits, discover things they like and like to transpose them into their work environment.
In other words, if they find a tool that either does something that the tools available in the workplace don’t do, or does it better, they’ll try to bring it in and use it under the radar.
It’s as old as time, and we’re facing it again with AI (Half of workers use unauthorized AI at work and don’t want to quit).
COVID: when the dikes of governance collapse
COVID dealt a fatal blow to this sometimes fragile edifice. Businesses were unprepared for remote work, had not made the effort to educate their employees about the tools and their remote uses (Are you really ready for all cases of remote working ?), and had not even deployed all the tools they had on the shelf.
So they had to do things in a hurry, and deploy just about anything in any old way, sometimes even duplicating business tools, and sometimes giving up and letting employees explicitly or tacitly impose their own solutions.
The best example of this is the success of Zoom, when almost all businesses were equipped with equivalent solutions from Microsoft or Google.
And just as they were satisfied with the solutions on offer, businesses let their guard down in terms of governance, and what was not optimal but often bearable went off the rails.
The age of information dispersal
“Yes, I saw the information go by…but I have to find it again”. A very, very common phrase.
I was talking to someone the other day who told me she was on the verge of information burnout. Not only because of the amount of information in circulation (Digital Infobesity: When Collaboration Tools Degrade Productivity, QWL and Amplify Mental Workload) but also because of its dispersion.
He uses email, of course.
For meetings, Teams is the official tool but, go figure, more than half of all meetings are held on Zoom.
Teams is also his messaging tool, but many of his colleagues also use WhatsApp 1:1 or in groups. Why do they do this? It’s happened gradually and has become a habit.
Ah, but there’s also Slack on the side! And the manager, who uses Apple Message and WhatsApp depending on his morning mood. And let’s not forget the geeky, paranoid colleague who only wants to use Signal.
Collaboration tools are of course Microsoft’s, except that Notions wreaks havoc under the radar.
And finally, the internal project management tool has its own messaging and document storage areas. The problem is that there are in fact two project management tools, each addressing a different part of the subject. And each with its own messaging system and documents… which sometimes also transit on WhatsApp, depending on the preferences of each party.
Is this an isolated case? I don’t think so at all, and I think his situation is even closer to the norm.
Bordelic Workplace
In 2023, the office worker used 11 apps to accomplish his tasks, compared with six in 2019 (Desk workers use nearly twice as many apps as they did in 2019, Gartner finds).
In 2021, 99% of remote workers say they use an average of 4.8 different conferencing applications (we can see the COVID effect) (70 Essential Online Collaboration Software Statistics: 2024 Market Share Analysis & Data).
As for businesses, they deploy an average of 16 SaaS tools to facilitate functions such as videoconferencing, e-mail, project management and data analysis (The Ultimate Guide to the Digital Workplace: Past History, Current Transformation & Trends Shaping the Future). In my own experience, this is a (very) low range, to which shadow IT must be added.
Information is so dispersed that it’s impossible to find or even keep track of it (In the hell of WhatsApp groups between colleagues FR). I won’t even go into the risks of shadow IT in terms of data confidentiality or evidential value in the event of a dispute with a customer with whom it is used!
The result is well known. Of course, there’s the QWL dimension mentioned above, but the impact on efficiency and productivity is indisputable.
And we’re talking about unnecessary IT costs for the business, in addition to human and organizational costs?
It’s time for a thorough clean-up.
A new approach to governance
I’ve never believed in monolithic tools and the promise of “one size fits all”. For me, there has to be a tool for every need, and I was delighted at the time with the change of direction driven at the time by Microsoft, with a logic of specialization coupled with very strong integration (The Digital workplace : both fragmented and integrated). Teams is perhaps the ultimate example of this, if you really try to use it properly.
On the other hand, there is one thing to avoid: competing tools for the same need. This is unfortunately what is happening, turning a tool for individual and collective efficiency into a tool for inefficiency (Why your Digital Workplace is hurting your organization’s performance)
When asked about their needs in this area, employees say no different: simplicity of use, capabilities adapted to various use cases (synchronous and asynchronous), and standardization to avoid fragmentation. And what’s the sticking point? Poor governance and a lack of training, amplified by fast adoption during the pandemic (What Employees Want From Their Collaboration Tools).
Bottom line
I never thought I’d be writing this, but it’s time for businesses to take back control of their digital workplace and its governance. One tool for each need, and then raising employee awareness of “what do I use in what circumstances” when, for example, e-mail and telephone are in competition at any given time, and where contextual intelligence will take precedence.
Today, employees spend too much time undergoing and searching for information, sometimes without even managing to find it.
The human and productive cost of poor governance of tools, which is one of the causes of their misuse, is today a hidden cost that we talk about, but without drawing the consequences.
It’s about time we did.
Image: productivity apps from Tada Images via Shutterstock.
