If you’re like a lot of other small business owners, you likely rely on several different apps and pieces of software to get through the day.
However, if your employees rely on all this software, too, it may also be causing your small business to hemorrhage money.
How could this be? These are the apps and software developed to make us work smarter and faster.
Well, according to new research from RingCentral, the plethora of apps is causing a lot of confusion in the workplace. In fact, of the 2,000 “knowledge workers” surveyed, the research has revealed 69% waste as many has 32 days a year because of app confusion.
App Overload
Ring Central’s study, “From Workplace Chaos to Zen: How App Overload Is Reshaping the Digital Workplace” looks at how this confusion occurs.
For example, the report notes the biggest problem is with communication apps. Specifically, it’s the multitude of these apps ooftwn used in business.
“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 at RingCentral, in a release accompanying the survey results.
Think about how many communications apps you use. It’s close to a handful, probably.
RingCentral’s data shows the average number of communications apps per person is 4. And 20% of those responding to the survey said they use 6 or more. That’s a lot of conversations in different places and certainly it’s easy to see how wasted time can add up quickly. If you need to reference those conversations, you’ll first have to remember where they took place!
The survey shows as much as an hour per day can be lost to communication app confusion. The average worker in the survey said they will flip between these communication apps as much as 10 times per hour.
Workers surveyed say having a single communications platform would be the most ideal. However, this may not be possible for small businesses on a budget. What a company could do is to attempt centralizing all work communications within the company to a single platform.
Image: RingCentral
Aira Bongco
The problem is that once one of these stop working, the productivity stops as well and it can really hurt your business.
You have to ensure that your staff is well trained and can easily adapt to changes. Most apps implement constant updates. So if they are easily confused, then your productivity suffers as well.