Mitel, an enterprise communications company, has discovered that substandard communications and collaboration practices are causing UK businesses to fall short on productivity. This lack of productivity costs businesses approximately £8,000 per employee every year, and up to £4 million annually for a company of 500 employees.
The independent survey, conducted by Webtorials in partnership with Opinium, analysed the ways in which people interact both inside and outside an organisation. According to the findings, UK workers spend on average 43 hours at work per week and more than two-thirds of their workday communicating and collaborating, yet waste nearly an entire day each week on inefficient working practices.
Additionally, the conveniences of chat and collaboration tools appear to be overlooked with just 9% of respondents using them regularly. Despite how embedded chat and instant messaging are in everyday consumer communications, low adoption in the workplace suggests enterprises are not offering a cohesive communications experience.
>See also: Top 5 collaboration and communication predictions for 2017
The report also found that employees lose on average 20% of their workday writing and responding to emails, yet 80% believed it is still an efficient form of communications.
80% of respondents under the age of 30 prefer use of the telephone for communicating at work, while 44% of workers over 40 choose to hide behind email over all other methods of communicating.
These survey results point to an over-reliance on traditional communications tools that appear to be costing modern businesses dearly. In today’s enterprise, where flexible working and mobility are commonplace, IT decision-makers need to enable employees to seamlessly communicate and collaborate from any device, at any time, through a single interface.
By combining voice, video, collaboration and chat into a unified application, employees can spend less time trying to connect and more time engaged in productive communications. This unified approach can save businesses money, improve productivity and provide a path to digital transformation.
>See also: How digital technology is transforming internal communication
“Email overload is certainly something our customers consistently reference as a productivity killer,” said Nick Beardsley at Olive Communications. “Too often people default to email for conversational collaboration. Simply by taking this sort of communication out of email and into a unified application it enables teams to realise the productivity benefits of real-time collaboration.”
“This study underscores the impact of inadequate communications and collaboration. Ironically, businesses are being held back by the very tools originally developed to improve productivity,” elaborated Simon Skellon, VP UK, Mitel.
“Despite operating in the world’s largest digital economy, it appears many UK companies have yet to adopt new ways of working.”
