Leading monitoring and management solutions provider for Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Zoom, Unify Square, have released an intriguing new report. The document discusses the “love-hate affair” that enterprise employees have with workstream collaboration tools.
According to Unify Square, various trends are emerging in the marketplace when it comes to collaboration, and they all have an impact on productivity, security, and employee behaviour. For instance, the report highlights that email is still a crucial consideration for a lot of companies. Though collaboration applications are growing in popularity, around 66% of employees say that they’ve mastered the art of balancing collaboration tools and email.
Another 40% of workers said that one of the chief benefits of using collaboration tools is less email. However, 74% say that they haven’t seen a reduction in the amount of correspondence in their inbox.
Creating a More Productive Workplace
Unify Square’s report suggests that the implementation of new collaboration tools has led to increased distractions for some users. 43% of enterprise employees believe that preventing distraction caused by apps is a shared responsibility; however, between management and themselves.
Incoming requests (39%) and personal conversations (41%) seem to be the biggest culprits for distraction in the workday, according to the findings. Additionally, Unify Square found that despite popular believe, enterprise employees are actually looking for more rules and guidelines from management when using collaboration apps.
40% of the employees in the report said that they wished stricter guidelines were in place around application usage. Around 60% of employees also believe that stricter rules would help with their work-life balance.
Securing and Protecting Collaboration
Around 90% of respondents from consumer-packaged goods brands said that they have never downloaded collaboration apps without IT approval, while 40% of people in high-tech companies have.
Although employees are willing to take some of the responsibility for the distractions faced in the collaborative workplace, they believe that collaboration security isn’t a shared responsibility. Crucially, 60% of employees said that it’s the IT department’s responsibility to ensure collaboration apps are secure.
According to the VP of Consulting services for Unify Square, Alan Shen, information security paradigms are changing in the current landscape. IT needs to ensure that they are up to date with the way that employees use collaboration tools. Today’s users are keeping data constantly active and moving. IT needs to develop a way to protect companies from the risks that collaborative solutions present.
