Cutting down on the 'Work around work’

Soma Tah 

Employees want to spend the majority of their time doing the actual work and not on doing meetings, assigning tasks, tracking progress, etc. Hence, workstream collaboration tools that deliver a conversational workspace are gaining momentum, says Rashmi Choudhary, Associate Principal Analyst, Gartner. 

Excerpt:

Agility is a basic ask 

Based on Gartner Digital Workplace survey 2019, more than 70 percent of millennials are increasingly attached towards the concept of using personal devices/spaces for collaboration activities than shared/huddle room spaces/devices. Millennials also desire for collaboration agility which can help them to reduce redundancies around routine work.   

Collaboration essentials for the modern workplace  

Today, employees want to spend the majority of their time doing the actual work and not doing meetings, assigning tasks, or communicating what they have done. This is called 'Work around work’. As a result, workstream collaboration tools that deliver a conversational workspace and help to do the job via a single platform and at the same time improve team coordination and performance are gaining traction. 

Although employees find themselves switching between different content and collaboration tools, they mostly trust email as the most common way to communicate. To improve collaboration in the workplace, organizations must diligently invest in tools which can be utilized as an activity hub centralizing conversations, tasks, content and application interactions. 

Organizations can leverage the immersive conversational workspace to create a high-performing collaborative micro-culture for their team members. Some examples of such tools include Microsoft Teams, Slack, Google Hangouts chat, etc.  

To sum up the entire story, collaboration channels are becoming the core building blocks of productivity and working essentials, not workspaces. However, tools have always been and will always be a part of the collaboration story, the larger element of people and process play even more important role.   

Future of traditional collaboration tools  

Traditional collaboration applications like email, chat and messaging will not completely die but the usage will significantly decrease. Gartner predicts that by the year-end 2022, 70 percent of teams will rely on workstream collaboration as the primary means of communicating, coordinating and sharing information between team members, displacing email. Organizations today as part of digital workplace unified communications strategies are reducing the use of desk phones/collaboration hardware equipment. Alongside, enterprise communication technology vendors have been focusing more on user experience and working on to make it better.  

Investment in intelligent tools 

For years, collaboration tools have been driven by manual interaction as employees react to teamwork needs. Innovations in workstream collaboration tools are going on to improve how employees self-synchronize to keep up team interactions. 

Gartner found that more than70 percent of organizations kickstart their digital workplace journey with a shift toward SaaS-based tools, further augmented by technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) and the Internet of Things (IoT).   

While comprehensive investments into sentiment analysis, deep learning and other aspects of artificial intelligence (AI) and advanced analytics are slow, the market is embracing advancements related to machine learning, bots, chatbots and prebuilt integrations. This progress is consistent with the work automation solution.