Enterprise Employees Express Love-Hate Relationship with Workplace Collaboration Applications

BELLEVUE, Wash., March 24, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Unify Square™, the leading monitoring & management software and services provider for Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Slack platforms, today released a report: "A Love-Hate Affair: Overcoming Challenges of Workstream Collaboration." The report examines the most utilized features across both unified communication and workstream collaboration application platforms, application usage trends and how they are impacting productivity, employee behavior, security and more. The findings also reveal how digital workplace collaboration applications impact the success of today's enterprises.

Email is Still Alive and Well
As collaboration application platforms continue to infiltrate organizations in every industry, email still maintains a key role in day-to-day business communications. Employees across the board, regardless of age/level/work schedule, agree that 66 percent of their colleagues have mastered the art of effectively balancing the use of both email and collaboration applications. 

Forty percent of enterprise workers agreed that one of the chief benefits of collaboration applications is fewer emails, yet 74 percent say they have not seen any significant decrease in the quantity of emails they receive since starting to use these collaboration applications.

Workplace Distraction is Everyone's Problem
With the implementation of workplace collaboration apps comes increased distractions for end users. The survey results highlighted that enterprise employees aren't denying their responsibility in distraction at work, with 43 percent believing that preventing distraction caused by collaboration applications is a shared responsibility between themselves and management.

Personal conversations (41 percent) and incoming requests taking away from current projects (39 percent) were noted as the biggest culprits for distraction caused by collaboration applications during the workday.

Employees Crave Structure and Strict Guidelines
Contrary to popular belief, enterprise employees crave structure and strict guidelines from management when it comes to the use of collaboration applications. In fact, 40 percent of enterprise employees wish their organizations enforced stricter rules around collaboration application usage. Nearly 60 percent of respondents believe that stricter rules would help improve work-life balance, and 42 percent believe a more enforced set of rules would help set expectations on usage for employees.

Collaboration Security is Not a Shared Responsibility
The survey found that employees working in high-tech industry companies are the least likely to let IT know about their app usage than any other industry, with nearly 40 percent admitting to downloading collaboration apps for personal use without IT's approval. Conversely, of the respondents working in consumer-packaged goods companies, over 90 percent say they have never downloaded collaboration applications without ITs approval.

Perhaps, most importantly, when it comes to making sure that collaboration applications are secure, over 60 percent believe the responsibility of securing collaboration apps should lie solely on their organization's IT department.

"In today's digital workplace, information security paradigms have changed. Employees' ever-changing preferences coupled with the introduction of new collaboration technology rolling out regularly, creates a constant need for IT to be in check with employees' usage of collaboration tools," said Alan Shen, Vice President of Consulting Services at Unify Square. "Because of your users, your data is alive, moving, and continually evolving. It's critical for IT to develop in concert, actively engaging business units to understand the risks and the role users play in managing collaboration risk."

To get access of the full report and eBook, visit: https://www.unifysquare.com/blog/overcoming-challenges-of-workstream-collaboration.

About the Research
Unify Square commissioned a survey of 500+ enterprise end-user employees; working at organizations with at least 1,000 employees.

• Industries surveyed: technology, government, healthcare, consumer, education, finance, manufacturing, legal, transportation, insurance, marketing/advertising
• Ages surveyed: 18-24, 25-34, 35-44, 45-54, 55-64, 65+
• Job levels surveyed: entry level, middle management, senior management, owner/executive/c-suite

About Unify Square
Unify Square's software and services optimize and enhance the world's largest collaboration and communication deployments, helping businesses manage and secure their meetings, chats & calls. The company's PowerSuite software creates a unified dashboard to surface actionable insights and help manage collaboration platforms -- optimizing and transforming performance health and user effectiveness. Founded by Microsoft product visionaries, Unify Square has become a global elite partner for Microsoft, Slack, Zoom and Workplace by Facebook.  Unify Square solutions have delivered value to more than 6 million collaboration seats, in over 275 enterprises across more than 50 countries, and in most major industry verticals. Headquartered in Bellevue, Washington, Unify Square also has offices in the United Kingdom, Germany, Switzerland, India, Australia and Lithuania.

Media Contact
Marney Burbidge
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SOURCE Unify Square

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