When you are confronted with large amounts of information, ‘information overload’ happens i.e., the quantity of information you can process exceeds your processing capacity. Information overload adversely impacts your mental, emotional, physical and interpersonal relationships. When you are asked to process a vast amount of data and tasks to get your work done, it can cause stress and anxiety.
A recent study revealed that 65% of UK employees were negatively impacted by the high amount of data they process at work. What is even scarier is that 91% of US workers admit they sometimes delete or discard work-related information without thoroughly reading it!
One culprit for information overload is the proliferation of productivity apps. Companies deploy too many apps to increase productivity and employees are forced to navigate through a vast maze of tools daily to get their jobs done. A poorly designed digital workplace example is using multiple apps for their team communications. This creates communication silos and a significant amount of team members’ time is spent searching for information rather than doing productive work.
Most organizations use multiple apps for their day-to-day operations. Poorly designed digital workplace solutions can result in poor customer service and customer dissatisfaction and it can put much pressure on your employees as well. Whenever your employees require additional information to do their work, they are forced to look in multiple places.
According to an analysis by Okta Inc, the number of software apps deployed by large firms across all industries worldwide has increased 68% over the past four years, reaching an average of 129 apps per company. This growing trend leads to information silos and increases the time spent searching for information. McKinsey reported that employees spend 1.8 hours every day—9.3 hours per week, on average—searching and gathering information. This serious problem affects your employees’ productivity and work-life balance.
The tool used in the workplace should be able to organize all communication in one place no matter how it came, to give a 360-degree view of the topic at hand. The centralized location provides insights needed to keep the customer journey smooth. It is frustrating for both the customer and the representatives to repeatedly go through the same issue. In the absence of a proper communication tool, employees are not able to navigate through the maze and get the required information quickly.
When the customer calls for any clarification, information retrieval happens in three ways, which are inefficient and may result in customer dissatisfaction.
Let us see how Clariti, one of the best digital workplace tools, helps to overcome these problems.
The easiest way to find the information is to rely on memory. But in the modern workplace due to the excess amount of data generated by all the digital tools, employees’ memory is likely to fail to deliver the result quickly and accurately.
Studies show that most people forget half of the information within a few days of training. The same happens with the various other processes that are followed at work. This problem is compounded when the same employee is expected to deal with multiple customers through various channels.
As the pace of communication increases for organizations, it becomes harder for employees to remember and search through disparate messages. In the absence of proper tools, they trust their memory to do their job, resulting in poor customer service.
The best solution to deal with this problem is to bring all communication forms to one place and connect them to maintain the context. Once all the communications are in one place and connected, employees can easily see the context behind all the information.
Once they have the context, they have clarity. The context in communication brings clarity to thinking, facilitates workflow, and gets work naturally organized. It also has other indirect benefits like better employee engagement, higher productivity and lower turnover.
If employees cannot solve a problem with the help of their memory, they take the help from their teammates. However, involving colleagues may not be the right thing to do consistently. When asked colleagues may not be armed with all the information and may have to rely on their memory or search in multiple places. Besides costing everybody wasted time, the work also doesn’t get done on time.
Clariti seamlessly connects related interactions from different communication channels such as email, chat, cloud documents, and social feeds into one context-based Workspace. Communicating with context through Workspace helps everyone to anticipate questions, and process information faster, without stressing memory. When the topic at hand requires help from other colleagues it is fast and easy in Clariti to rope in a new person by seamlessly setting the context of the discussion.
Users can be added or removed from discussions in the Workspace without losing the context and all the information is saved automatically. Workspaces can be named based on customer name, geography, or any other reference preferrable to the user.
Many organizations believe that using specialized tools for each task gives flexibility to their employees. They don’t realize the negative impact of using too many disconnected systems. For example, many organizations use one tool for email and many different tools for chat, shared documents, and social media management. While these tools are helpful, the lack of connection reduces productivity due to the time spent switching between them and searching for information in disconnected silos.
When an employee has a customer in front of them or on the phone, they must be able to respond quickly. If the employee has to search for information in multiple communication channels, they cannot provide quality customer service. Too, if the information on one topic is scattered across several disconnected repositories, they may spend a lot of their time toggling between multiple windows looking for the info. All this increases stress and impacts quality and productivity of employees.
Clariti keeps all related communications, including emails, chats, calendar events, to-dos, and calls, connected as if it is one conversation. There is no need to shift between many apps and there is no need to stress trying to remember all the connected conversations in memory. Clariti eliminates the need to search across many apps looking for information and makes it easy to see the big picture without any effort.
The secret to building better digital workplace trends begins with Clariti. Users can continue to send and receive emails in Clariti, share files, invite team members to chat or call, set to-dos and calendar events. Employees need not waste their valuable time switching between different email, chat, or to-do apps. Clariti organizes emails, calls, events and chats by topic and into Workspaces.
You can do everything from one app and all the related information is connected intelligently in Workspaces so that everything on a particular topic is at your fingertips whenever you need it. There is no learning curve at all. When you use Clariti’s Workspaces, you don’t waste time locating data in information silos and can be significantly more productive without any additional effort. Try it today and see the difference.
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