Employee connections are essential to keeping an organization functioning, but with the rise in digital tools and technology, digital fatigue can easily set in. In fact, according to research, digital fatigue can have severe consequences for employees and organizations alike, such as decreased productivity and, ultimately, higher turnover rates.
Research suggests that digital fatigue can lead to decreased physical activity as employees become ... [+]
Another study found that digital fatigue can lead to decreased physical activity as employees become overwhelmed by technology. Again, this is a concern because employee health and wellbeing are critical to productivity and organizational success.
“It’s important to be mindful when utilizing digital tools, especially in the workplace,” said Kate Dobson, head of strategic academic partnerships and employer-led education at London’s University of Roehampton, in an interview. “Leaders must take steps to ensure that their employees are not overwhelmed by the demand for digital connection.”
As a consequence, organizations must try to realize the importance of digital fatigue in their workforce and create strategies to help employees prevent it. But, according to Josh Lee, CEO of the productivity platform provider Swit, the fundamental problem is that efforts to support collaboration have typically focused on adding more connections between employees with new tools instead of more meaningful connections.
According to Lee, the heart of the problem with most tools and processes that organizations currently use to manage projects and teams of remote and hybrid workers can be summed up in a word—fragmentation. “Disjointed, unscalable workflows create blind spots at every level, making alignment impossible,” Lee said in an interview. “In this type of structure, the decision-making process is inherently slow and lacks context and clarity. In a hybrid work environment where projects are often handled asynchronously, company-wide work management becomes even more difficult.”
So, what can organizations do to prevent digital fatigue?
First, Lee suggests focusing on driving employee connections in meaningful ways. This means creating a platform enabling real-time collaboration between employees and helping them build relationships instead of simply using tools and processes that add more “connections” without providing context or clarity. After all, when employees are not connected in meaningful ways, they are more likely to experience digital fatigue. Here are three strategies, proposed by Lee, that organizations can use to ensure employees are connected meaningfully.
1. Adopt transparent and scalable systems
Executives at enterprises may often find themselves dealing with an endless string of issues that aren’t easily traceable through their existing project management platforms. Therefore, they need a way to gain visibility into the root of their problems, uncover areas of improvement and develop strategies to address them. This is where risk management platforms come in.
Risk management should provide executives with advanced analytics tools that enable them to anticipate and manage risks more efficiently, improving their decision-making process and increasing their chances for success. With this type of approach, executives can identify potential hazards in their projects and processes before they turn into significant issues. By being able to anticipate these risks, executives can develop strategies for reducing the impact of any disruption or delay that may occur.
“When executives have access to a real-time, up-to-date overview of their organization’s progress, they can quickly identify bottlenecks, allocate resources more effectively and make critical decisions faster,” concluded Dobson. To that end, she recommends that leaders utilize a team collaboration and project management platform designed to connect individuals and teams vertically within the organizational chart as well as horizontal, cross-functional project teams—all in one place. From the individual worker’s perspective, make sure the platform is designed to support everything that matters to their personal performance, from setting goals to tracking progress and achieving results. This, in turn, provides effortless transparency across the organization for executives and managers.
2. Understand various task characteristics
Leaders must understand the various characteristics of tasks to ensure they are appropriately assigned, completed on time and within the budget. Task characteristics include complexity, type of task, duration, required skills and resources, risk potential and any other factors that may affect its completion. Therefore, organizations should adopt a “task-oriented view” rather than simply looking at the traditional sprint cycle when managing different tasks. This means that teams need the ability to quickly create and adjust ad-hoc projects, which can help them easily stay aligned with goals without needing to go through extensive processes each time. For example, the types of issues and timelines that arise in departments such as sales and marketing or customer relationship management tend to be more varied than those of IT or accounting. As a result, the “scrum” periods are less predictable from task to task.
By understanding the different task characteristics, leaders can better understand how to assign tasks and what resources are necessary for completion. Leaders should also ensure that they create a culture of accountability in which employees understand their responsibilities and feel empowered to take ownership of their tasks. This can help reduce digital fatigue and improve the overall efficiency of teams. Finally, leaders should also consider how tasks can be broken down into smaller chunks to ensure that they are completed in a timely manner and with minimal disruption to other team members or processes. Breaking tasks down into smaller chunks can help reduce complexity and provide employees with clear expectations for task completion.
3. Implement an integrated digital workflow system
Whichever of the cloud ecosystems a company might use, such as Google Workspace or Microsoft 365, it’s important to realize these platforms do not in themselves eliminate the information silos that come from fragmented workflows. In fact, despite their essential capabilities for providing ubiquitous connectivity, they don’t overcome the workflow friction caused by functional divisions, approval hierarchies, or multiple disjointed apps such as Asana, Slack, Zoho, for example.
Rather than simply relying on these cloud-based ecosystems, the most successful teams implement an integrated digital workflow system. This type of system simplifies and streamlines those workflows by leveraging data from existing systems and creating automated processes to eliminate manual, time-consuming tasks. It reduces complexity while enabling rapid deployment—allowing users to quickly and easily create new workflows and automate existing ones with minimal effort.
Integrated digital workflow systems promote collaboration by centralizing data and information, eliminating the advent of shadow IT, which can cause significant problems for organizations. By consolidating all relevant data into a single source of truth, users are able to access the most up-to-date version of any document or file, enabling a much-needed single view of work progress.
Overall, integrated digital workflow systems provide the necessary infrastructure to unlock the full potential of cloud-based ecosystems by streamlining and improving workflows, enhancing collaboration among teams, and guaranteeing accurate data is delivered to the right people at the right time. They provide an invaluable asset for any organization looking to maximize their return on investment in cloud-based solutions.
In summary, in the new world of remote work, companies won’t thrive by focusing on employee management or treating humans as “resources” but by focusing on meaningful employee connections and treating them as whole people. By keeping a few critical components in mind, such as task characteristics, contextual understanding, and visibility of progress, organizations can ensure they have the right project management platform in place to maximize efficiency while creating an excellent space for collaboration. This will help them foster an environment conducive to employee engagement and productivity—allowing teams to be successful no matter where they are doing their work.
