For many people, the initial transition to remote work last year wasn't exactly a bed of roses. The sudden shift to the home office left us all with an uncomfortable mix of stress and isolation, and turned our world upside down.
One of the main causes of these feelings was our slow means of communication, isolated from each other. When we all worked together in an office, we could still make up for the limitations of traditional corporate communication tools with face-to-face interaction. If we needed answers, help, or just wanted to talk, we'd knock on a colleague's door or meet in the lunchroom.
But our old tools no longer suffice for remote work. The new workday requires technologies that promote fast, smooth collaboration even when everyone is no longer in the same building or office. Since hybrid, flexible work models are exactly what employees want for the future, it's high time more companies adopt collaboration platforms.
A survey by Wakefield Research confirms this. The company surveyed thousands of users and IT decision makers who use collaboration tools like Slack, Microsoft Teams or SION for work. The survey sought to find out what role collaboration platforms have played over the past year and what trends are shaping the future of these platforms.
The key points at a glance
The data shows a clear trend toward collaboration platforms as the new standard. Platforms are making us less reliant on email and meetings, accelerating business communications and making them more people-centric.
Collaboration platforms will remain essential in the future
But despite the rapid pace of change, both users and IT decision makers have experienced firsthand the success of the new way of communicating - and the majority of employees and decision makers don't want to return to the old methods.
Traditional communication platforms are becoming increasingly obsolete
While collaboration platforms are becoming more popular, traditional communication methods are becoming less popular.
Employees prefer collaboration platforms to emails
Emails have been around for nearly 50 years. They are the standard communication tool at work. But they are also the remnant of an outdated hierarchical enterprise model.
The key to a successful hybrid enterprise model is transparency, shared decision-making and collaboration. The closed structure of email separates employees from the information they need, as well as from each other.
While Stewart Butterfield, CEO of Slack, has said he doesn't see "any benefits to completely replacing email," collaboration platforms seem to beat email not only in terms of productivity, but also in fostering a healthy company culture and preventing feelings of isolation.
Collaboration platforms save employees time
According to studies, email takes up more than 3 hours a day (in other words, about 37% of a typical knowledge worker's week) - no wonder, since you have to keep an eye on your inbox, filter junk mail, scroll through long "reply to all" threads, and send messages back and forth before you can make a decision.
With collaboration platforms, both individuals and cross-departmental project teams can tackle projects and problems quickly without having to give up related context or lose track of what's going on. This increases productivity tremendously.
Studies have shown that users save an average of 90 minutes a day when they use collaboration platforms instead of email. That's a total of 7.5 hours a week, which means users are saving nearly a full day each week.
Collaboration platforms encourage face-to-face contact
But a productive hybrid office requires more than efficiency. Employees also need to stay in touch with each other to stay motivated. The biggest challenges of remote-work networking are:
Email is essentially a formal medium that makes it difficult to build interpersonal connections with colleagues in the home office. Being limited to one-on-one conversations can exacerbate feelings of isolation by limiting visibility and preventing employees from interacting with the entire company.
Collaboration platforms connect people because they are provided not only a collaboration tool, but also a virtual office. Conversations don't have to be formal. 80% of users say they would rather send a GIF in a channel on a collaboration platform than in a group email.
The more informal setting makes them feel more comfortable interacting with others more quickly, rather than with impersonal usernames. Informal channels foster a company culture that focuses on people. In fact, 95% of users use team-building channels with their colleagues.
Collaboration platforms break through communication barriers