Australian employees are spending 4-6 hours per week consolidating or tracking down information across technology tools at work, costing businesses more than $75b a year in lost productivity.
Thirty-five percent of Australian employees don’t believe their company has the right technology in place to support a hybrid workplace, as hybrid working sets in as a ‘new normal’ for a vast majority of Australian businesses according to independent research conducted by Propeller Insights for content enablement platform, Templafy
Navigating different folders, databases and tools to find the right document is not only tiresome for employees but also carries a high cost for organisations. With workers losing an average of 4-6 hours per week tracking down information between tech tools, the impact on business productivity could top $75 billion.
The research revealed nearly two fifths of Australian workers (37%) say their company needs to simplify the technology tools and processes in place, with one in four employees (25%) feeling frustrated by having to switch between so many technology tools each day to complete their work.
While nearly two thirds of Australian workers (63%) believe that their company will successfully adopt a hybrid workplace over the next six to twelve months, a third of employees (30%) believe a hybrid workplace will make it harder to manage information, with over four fifths of employees (84%) believing a hybrid workplace would be successful if their company invests in the right technology to support it.
“The pandemic accelerated the digital transformation roadmap for a lot of Australian businesses, forcing everyone to re-evaluate the workplace,” said Mads Frederiksen, Managing Director APAC, Templafy.
“Organisations were forced to rapidly change the way they worked, with a lot of effort put into finding the right solution that allows them to remain productive and internally aligned during the transition to a hybrid workplace. The new way of working has changed forever, with emphasis on flexibility and remote working.”
Templafy’s Business Enablement Report also found that the most common reasons why technology fails within the workplace include; a lack of consistent use of the technology company-wide (58%); new tools that don’t integrate with existing tools and workflows (57%); and insufficient training (55%).
Overcoming productivity issues
In order to combat disconnected content and workflows, Australian employees require technology that is more; user friendly and intuitive (72%); integrated into daily workflows (71%); and company-wide so that colleagues from across the organisation can work better together.
What’s more, nearly a fifth of Australians (18%) agreed that it’s a lot harder to learn and use a new technology tool in a remote environment, meaning businesses need to invest in additional training for tech tools to support flexible working.
To ensure businesses are tackling these workplace issues, it requires business enablement stacks (e.g. Slack and Zoom) which would empower staff to improve their efficiency with applications and tech tools used daily.
“It is vital to ensure the right technology setup is in place to support the future of work, a point which will remain the focus for some time to come,” Mr Frederiksen said.
“Organisations which adopt solutions with less software that does more to enable a unified, efficient and most importantly, pleasant working experience will be the ones who get to define the future of work.”
Templafy is pioneering the content enablement category with a first-of-its-kind infrastructure designed to actively accelerate business performance through connected content. With connected content – content that is always on-brand, compliant and optimised to drive strong business outcomes - enterprises can ensure their business content does its primary job for the organisation, driving business results.
For more information about Templafy, please visit www.templafy.com
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Methodology
A national online survey of adult full-time employees who work in companies of 100 employees or more, was conducted by Propeller Insights between March 26th and March 27th, 2021. Respondents opted into an online database, from there, they were targeted based on demographics. To further confirm qualifications, respondents were asked to verify their information in the survey itself, self-identifying qualifications, with the maximum margin of sampling error was +/- 3 percentage points with a 95 percent level of confidence. Australia’s sample size included 401 full-time employees who work in companies of 100 employees or more.
