Apps are a necessary part of the modern workplace. They help us manage our time, plan for the future and communicate with our coworkers.
While some apps like Slack, Trello and Dropbox can help us to do our everyday work they can also add chaos to workflows and completely disrupt productivity.
Think about it. How many times have you been distracted from a task because you need to answer a team message?
While these desktop apps are designed to boost productivity they can actually have the opposite effect.
New research from RingCentral, a cloud-based communications and collaboration solutions provider found that workers use an average of four communications apps, with 20% using six or more platforms.
Apparently, workers switch between these apps 10 times an hour. This means that they are wasting a total of 32 days per year.
“Today’s workforce is under siege by a flood of communications apps. More than ever, our attention is scattered across a wide array of different apps and communications channels,” says Riadh Dridi, CMO, RingCentral. “These apps are meant to bolster our productivity, but managing myriad apps is proving difficult—with serious repercussions for businesses.”
This trend has not gone unnoticed by workers. The research shows that there is growing frustration among employees. 70% of workers say they are challenged by the sheer volume of work communication.
In fact, many workers say they would prefer to do household chores (53%), pay bills (52%), deal with an insurance company (46%), handle junk mail (45%) or clean their spam emails (45%) rather than navigate the array of B2B app options.
Younger workers are more open to using apps in the workplace. 18-44 year-olds are more likely to use team messaging (43%) for a longer period of time (46-60 minutes per day). While workers 45+ years old still prefer email (51%).
So, the next time you’re spending hours perfecting your to-do list maybe you should just get stuck in and actually get something done instead.
