Dive Brief:
- Almost two-thirds of workers say a lack of integration between tools and processes weigh down cross-team collaboration, a Microsoft report released Thursday found. The company surveyed 2,700 employees and 1,800 business decision-makers.
- Workers flagged a mismatch between technology and work styles. Nearly 3 in 5 workers find the tools they use to collaborate do not align with how their teams prefer to work.
- More than two-thirds of workers encounter knowledge silos at least once a week, according to a Stack Overflow report released last month. Silos are a problem for leaders as well: three-quarters of managers encounter the same issue at least once a week.
Dive Insight:
The problem for some organizations isn't scarcity, but clutter. More than two in five IT leaders said employees were adding SaaS apps to the arsenal without notifying IT, a Snow Software report showed.
The more data gets siloed, the more workers will contend with administrative tasks and busy work, Microsoft found. Three key factors are pushing employees toward unfulfilling work:
- Businesses are generating more data than ever
- The data is siloed from the collaboration apps where work gets done
- Hybrid work amplifies the amount of data and information needed for regular operations.
At most businesses, employees are not part of the decision-making process around digital transformation, according to Microsoft.
"The saying is that technology is easy, and people are hard,” said Nicole Forsgren, a partner at Microsoft Research, in an email. "People, essentially, are the most important part of an organization, but also the most complex. If you remove all agency from people, if they can’t contribute, if they can’t make any decisions, it can be really discouraging.”
The average large organization uses 367 software applications and systems, a Forrester Consulting study commissioned by Airtable found. Workers navigating the crowded ecosystem spend nearly one-third of their work week to find the data and information they need.
