A new study commissioned and produced by SoftChoice sheds some revealing light on business collaboration tools and why so many of them fail to gain traction among a company’s employees. The answer is simpler than you might think. Unless employee buy-in on those tools, they’re not very likely to utilize them with enthusiasm unless they offer a compelling advantage and extreme ease of use.
By The Numbers
Before we get into the nuts and bolts of the survey, let’s take a quick look at some of the more common collaborative tools that businesses are generally in the habit of providing. Here, we’ll look not only at the frequency that companies offer a given tool, but how often it is used by rank and file employees in practice:
* Desktop telephone – Offered by 86% of companies, regularly used by 82% of employees
* Teleconferencing feature on the desktop phone – Offered by 69% of companies, regularly used by 12% of employees
* Instant Messaging – Offered by 68% of companies, regularly used by 40% of employees
* Email – Offered by 97% of companies, regularly used by 95% of employees (makes you wonder who those 2% are!)
* Video Conferencing – Offered by 70% of companies, regularly used by just 5% of employees
* Screen Sharing – Offered by 60% of companies, regularly used by just 8% of employees
* Mobile Phone – Offered by 68% of companies, regularly used by 69% of employees
* Social Collaboration – Offered by 40% of companies, regularly used by just 10% of employees
Some of these numbers are surprising, while others are not. Given the popularity of mobile devices, it’s hardly surprising that a majority of employees regularly use them. One almost can’t imagine life without email, and of course, if there’s a phone sitting on your desk, odds are good that you’re going to use it.
Others of these stats however, are very surprising, especially the extremely low adoption rates of video conferencing, screen sharing and social collaboration tools, which is perhaps the biggest surprise of all, given the popularity of social media. So what’s going on here?
The first big clue regarding the reasons behind the resistance to some collaboration tools is simply that 74% of employees surveyed indicated that they prefer face-to-face communications with their peers. Even more interestingly, fully 56% of employees spend 2 plus hours a day in face-to-face meetings, with 26% spending 2-5 hours a day, and 30% spending 5 plus hours a day in meetings. Clearly then, this preference casts a long shadow on collaborative tools that would take the place of a face-to-face meeting.
The other half of that equation, however is the fact that employees feel that they have no stake in the technology. 77% of employees say they’re not consulted before the new tool is purchased and rolled out. Nearly 60% say that no one bothered to ask them about the tool’s usefulness post-implementation. On the other hand, 72% of employees who are consulted before hand feel that the tools used make them more productive.
There are deeper and more meaningful implications to these numbers than you might think. Employees who are not consulted before the purchase and implementation of a new productivity tool are three times more likely not to see themselves at their current place of employment in the long term. The lessons here seem pretty obvious.
