Does enterprise software make us more productive?

Once seen as a way to cut down on end­less meet­ings and give us bet­ter con­trol of our time, email is now look­ing a lit­tle anti­quat­ed in the work­place.

From project man­age­ment tools that can plan our day by the minute to instant mes­sag­ing plat­forms con­nect­ing col­leagues across depart­ments in sec­onds, enter­prise soft­ware has offered busi­ness­es a far more sophis­ti­cat­ed, agile and effi­cient means of com­mu­ni­ca­tion.

But if busi­ness­es are look­ing for a fun­da­men­tal way to improve employ­ee engage­ment and people’s work­ing lives, there’s no guar­an­tee enter­prise soft­ware will pro­vide the answer.

The world is becom­ing increas­ing­ly dom­i­nat­ed by social media and tech­nol­o­gy that gives instant access, but is this what employ­ees want in their work­ing lives? Or is employ­ee enter­prise soft­ware just anoth­er dis­trac­tion from cre­at­ing good work?

A new dawn for employee enterprise software

As many thou­sands of work­ers move away from their office to work from home dur­ing the coro­n­avirus cri­sis, more than ever we need tools that help us com­mu­ni­cate with our col­leagues quick­ly, effi­cient­ly and sen­si­tive­ly.

A report from Gart­ner, Coro­n­avirus (COVID-19) out­break: long and short-term actions for CIOs, high­lights just how vital enter­prise soft­ware has become. One of the company’s rec­om­men­da­tions is that employ­ers must expand its dig­i­tal work­places and access. Iden­ti­fy­ing poten­tial risks to secu­ri­ty, updat­ing poli­cies and access train­ing, and pro­vid­ing new tech­no­log­i­cal capa­bil­i­ties, such as video calls, mes­sag­ing and col­lab­o­ra­tion tools, all play a role.

“This real­ly should be a wake-up call for organ­i­sa­tions that spend too much time focus­ing on dai­ly oper­a­tional needs at the expense of invest­ing in dig­i­tal busi­ness and long-term resilience,” says Sandy Shen, senior dig­i­tal ana­lyst at Gart­ner.

“There’s also an oppor­tu­ni­ty for CIOs [chief infor­ma­tion offi­cers] to get to the top of the table with this, through work­ing close­ly with human resources. You need to come up with a tech­nol­o­gy-enabled busi­ness plan. In these sit­u­a­tions, What­sApp and Face­book Work and oth­er plat­forms can be help­ful, but you have to take every step to ensure it’s secure and used prop­er­ly.”

Are they actually making people more productive?

Long before the rates of home-work­ing sky­rock­et­ed, there were already many clear, prof­itable ben­e­fits to intro­duc­ing this kind of tech.

The the­o­ry behind the use of Slack and oth­er enter­prise soft­ware is sim­i­lar to that of an open-plan office. It is designed to make com­mu­ni­ca­tion far more open, to erode hier­ar­chies and give teams a bet­ter sense of con­nec­tion. Putting this into prac­tice, how­ev­er, isn’t so sim­ple.

For exam­ple, Res­cue­Time, which pro­vides time man­age­ment advice and tools, not­ed that out of the ten hours employ­ees spend sit­ting at their screens each day, half of those are on chat mes­sag­ing apps like Slack, Teams and Work­place. Notably, it also found that employ­ees had not spent less time com­mu­ni­cat­ing with each oth­er than they had done six years ago.

“The aim of these apps should be that peo­ple are spend­ing less time on com­mu­ni­cat­ing, but if we look at the impact these tools are hav­ing, it can be a lot less impres­sive than we’d like. We need to think real­ly crit­i­cal­ly about how we use these tools,” says Rob­by McDon­nell, chief exec­u­tive at Res­cue­Time.

There’s also the issue of con­stant mes­sag­ing break­ing up flow or focus. Get­ting 45 to 50 mes­sages a day can make it much hard­er to get the intense peri­ods of focus employ­ees want.

This real­ly should be a wake-up call for organ­i­sa­tions that spend too much time focus­ing on dai­ly oper­a­tional needs at the expense of invest­ing in dig­i­tal busi­ness and long-term resilience

On aver­age, infor­ma­tion work­ers spend three min­utes on any sin­gle task before being inter­rupt­ed or switch­ing to anoth­er, accord­ing to a Microsoft study shared with Recode, which used wear­able sen­sors and com­put­er-track­ing soft­ware. Mul­ti­taskers can expe­ri­ence a 40 per cent decrease in pro­duc­tiv­i­ty, accord­ing to Microsoft.

This kind of mul­ti­task­ing means there’s a risk that instead of doing one thing well, you could actu­al­ly just be switch­ing between activ­i­ties and doing them all poor­ly. As McDon­nell sums up: “Just because you have a lot more of some­thing, or it’s a lot faster, doesn’t nec­es­sar­i­ly make it bet­ter.”

Avoiding social media communication pitfalls

As well as avoid­ing an influx of com­mu­ni­ca­tion through enter­prise soft­ware, busi­ness­es might need to look at exact­ly how they mon­i­tor its use.

It’s often said that busi­ness­es should focus on tech­nol­o­gy and the work­place expe­ri­ence through look­ing at con­sumers. As peo­ple would expect instant stream­ing ser­vices for enter­tain­ment and a quick way to con­nect with fam­i­ly and friends, it’s not unrea­son­able to expect the same expe­ri­ence at work.

But the Econ­o­mist Intel­li­gence Unit found these sorts of sys­tems can lead to dis­crep­an­cies and occa­sion­al upset in work­place com­mu­ni­ca­tion as some 31 per cent of mil­len­ni­als use instant mes­sag­ing to com­mu­ni­cate with col­leagues and clients, com­pared to just 12 per cent of employ­ees over the age of 55, for exam­ple.

The research sug­gests this can have seri­ous impli­ca­tions for work­places as poor com­mu­ni­ca­tions can lead to stress­ful work envi­ron­ments, stalled careers, missed per­for­mance goals and lost sales.

But Adri­an Furn­ham, prin­ci­pal behav­iour­al psy­chol­o­gist at Stam­ford Asso­ciates, says these fears might be exag­ger­at­ed: “For so many, instant mes­sag­ing has become the pri­ma­ry way of com­mu­ni­cat­ing; think about how many peo­ple would rather get in touch via a text than a phone call?

“There’s per­haps a risk that old­er peo­ple might strug­gle, but even they’re catch­ing on a lot more quick­ly to tech­nol­o­gy with some encour­age­ment.”

Bet­ter inter­nal com­mu­ni­ca­tion should be more about care­ful­ly com­mu­ni­cat­ed tar­gets and feed­back. Furn­ham con­cludes: “The best thing to focus on will always be out­comes. It’s best just to make clear what needs to get done and explain if there’s a prob­lem. How you get there doesn’t mat­ter.”