Earlier this year, we kicked off a research study to update our Intranet Guidelines Report, soon to be in its fourth edition. We’re completing visits to over 15 organizations and carrying out usability testing and field studies with around 100 employees. In this research, we are examining how digital workplace tools support or hinder employee productivity, collaboration, communication, and morale.

Definition: Digital workplace tools are websites or applications that people use in the workplace, including but not limited to the company intranet.

The digital workplace tools we’ve studied range in purpose from chat platforms, to collaboration and documentation platforms, to domain-specific work tools, to email, work-tracking, and task-management applications.

Watching and interviewing employees interacting with digital tools has revealed that there’s an abundance of tools available today. If organizations aren’t careful to separate what’s faddish from functional, employees will end up with a toolset that’s more confusing than constructive. In this article, we highlight some of our observations and provide 10 recommendations when procuring digital workplace tools.

Behaviors Related to Digital Workplace Tools

  1. A surplus of digital workplace tools places a cognitive burden on employees, as it takes time for people to stop and think about where to find each tool. In many cases, employees rely on the intranet as their launching point for digital workplace tools, but tools are not always linked on intranets. Some employees were using browser history and bookmarks to keep track of their digital workplace tools, but company-mandated system or network updates will often clear out saved browser history or bookmarks.

“I still have to think really hard on where [tool #1] is, where is [tool #2], and [tool #3] is. We need a dashboard where I can put the tools I use most […]. Maybe we have that already, but it’s not easy for me to find it.”

“…again, we have so many tools. So, I’m sure that you’ll hear this from everyone… It’s great that we have access to all of these tools and information but there’s no easy way to get through each signon and security process.”

“…I know I have the note [about where to find the tools] somewhere, I just never know where.”

  1. Remembering usernames and passwords for many different tools is cumbersome and can lead to security risks. In addition to figuring out the launch pad for digital workplace tools, it takes employees even more time and cognitive effort to remember their usernames and passwords, especially when single signon functionality is not available. When login credentials can’t be recalled, employees waste time and energy answering security questions to regain access to the tool. In one case, too many login attempts locked a product manager out of a tool that she needed in order to prepare for a daily standup meeting.

We also observed employees at multiple sites keeping passwords stored on sticky notes displayed in the office or in cloud-based documentation tools.

“I cheat a little, but I keep my personal stuff in [cloud-based documentation tool], including passwords.”

  1. Having too many tools leads to unproductive task switching and induces stress. Employees in today’s workplaces are often interrupted, must frequently switch contexts, and often change teams. When people already spend so much energy keeping up with their work, switching between many different tools (or constantly questioning which tool to use) makes work less productive and reduces morale. This state of affairs begs the need for a focused, purpose-based toolset that’s easy to access and scale across teams. Users in our study expressed their frustration:

“I have disruptors all day long and no way to handle them. I flip between [tool #1] and [tool #2], but I am all over the board with structuring my notes.”

  1. Tool overload drives users back to less efficient, analog methods of managing their work. Digital workplace tools can help people manage their time and emulate checking things off a to-do list. However, when too many tools are available and no training is provided, employees can feel like it will take too long to learn how to apply the tools to their jobs in productive ways. Defaulting to old-fashioned, nondigital methods for completing tasks often occurs, but at the expense of transparency and open communication across teams or the organization at large.

“I get satisfaction from paper printouts of my calendar each day. I write down what I have going on...I like it because, if I take notes on something, if I see it and touch it, it stays with me. As dumb as it is, it is satisfying to cross things off.”

  1. Digital workplace tools are not effective unless all parties involved (including team members, leadership, stakeholders, and client partners) have proper access. We observed some of our study participants spending long periods of time extracting readily available information from collaboration tools and reformatting for others in the form of emails, presentation decks, or PDFs. Not only is this an ineffective use of time, but it also introduces the risk of discussions and decisions occurring on multiple channels (not to speak of potential errors accidentally made while transferring information).

“Now if they have comments, we have to bring back that knowledge in there [back into the tool].”

When teams have multiple channels for communication and not everyone is on each channel, the result is confusion, duplication, and fragmented communication.

“[We use chat tool #1] for communication, but we have the problem that not everyone is on it, so we also have to use [ chat tool #2].”

10 Recommendations for Acquiring New Digital Tools

  1. Conduct your own research with employees and digital workplace tools, before you purchase them. This research will help you make the best purchase choices. Once a tool is in use, continue your research to identify opportunities for improvement. Do an audit of all the tools used and investigate not just the type of tool, but also its functionalities. For example, can people comment within certain tools? Which tools have been personally procured versus workplace-procured? This research could start with something as simple as a survey to understand the broader scope of employees’ current toolset and needs.
  1. Don’t acquire new tools without assessing whether the need for the tool exists or whether an already existing tool serves the same purpose. Don’t just add tools because they’re trendy or supposedly used by startups — just because a tool is popular does not mean that it will work for your organization. When tools are procured haphazardly without thinking about your employees’ current toolbox and needs, you risk introducing redundant functionality across tools, which places an additional burden on employees as they must keep track of which tool to use for a specific task.

"When is [documentation tool] the source of truth and when does it jump to another place?"

It also means that in some cases, project point people are forced to update two different tools with the same information. This process wastes time and also introduces risk that the information contained in one tool contradicts that in another.

  1. Study whether it would be helpful for your organization to allow employees to use free or self-procured tools and create guidelines for downloading such tools. We observed employees at some sites using their own self-procured software to perform common tasks, because of lack of awareness of existing tools or lack of speed in receiving a license. This practice leads to a redundancy in tools and confusion among employees as to which is the best tool. In cases where there is a stated tool for a particular job, such as housing documentation or work tracking, we recommend not allowing employees to use self-procured tools and clearly stating which tool is institutionally approved to avoid bloating your toolset and introducing redundancy.
  1. Immediately bring all of the necessary people into your digital workplace tools to give inclusive access and visibility. Anyone who’s involved with a project or impacted by the documents, conversations, and status-updates often contained in digital workplace tools should have access; don’t force people to repeatedly ask for access or try to stay informed without it.
  1. Agree on key performance indicators for your digital workplace tools. Are your tools meant to be platforms for communication, to document decisions, to manage workflows, or to recap key product information? Whatever their purpose, collect analytics data on your tool usage: track how many new pages are created monthly, how many comments are added, how many people have adopted the tools and watch your employees as they engage with the tools to see how successful or unsuccessful they are.
  1. Communicate how your tools work, how they are organized, and train employees to use them. Help employees to see the value of new tools and demonstrate how they can use them effectively to save time and avoid communication breakdown. Consider creating a global app catalog linked from the intranet, where employees can enjoy easy access to the applications they use most to do their jobs. Allow for customization of the global app catalog, so employees can see all of the applications available, but only view the apps that matter most to them in their customized version. Include links to launch the apps (preferably with single signon enabled), get help, and information that outlines each platform’s exact purpose.
  1. Make sure that the tools have clear, purposeful labels. For example, Concur is a tool which employees in large organizations use for booking travel. In several cases throughout our study, we’ve observed a direct link to Concur from intranet navigation and footers. Though a seasoned user knows that Concur is a travel-booking tool, we’ve repeatedly observed other employees struggle to find travel policies and where to go to book travel. Audit the names of your tools. Don’t use branded names for tools. Frontload names with information-carrying words that reflect the purpose of the tool (for example, Travel Booking – Concur) to help employees efficiently select the right tool on the first try.
  1. If employee information is available in specific tools, make sure it matches the data available in other digital workplace tools, such as on the intranet. Personal profiles in digital workplace tools aren't always up to date or fail to contain useful information about people. One participant was trying to find out where a colleague sat in the building, so he opened the colleague's profile in the documentation platform, but no details were available. The employee remembered that a seating-plan app was available on the intranet, but couldn't recall the name of the app. A search on the intranet wasn't successful, so the employee sent an instant message to another colleague to ask about where to find it.

"I'm not going to waste time looking [on the intranet]"

If directory integration is not possible, encourage users to fill out their tool-specific profiles with data such as preferred contact information, office location, and link to cubicle maps, organograms, or other useful tools directly from profiles.

  1. Remove redundant tools. Take a firm stance on which tools will be used for specific work tasks and implement a sunsetting or migration strategy for the tools that will no longer be used. Nominate tool custodians and content admins who are responsible for monitoring your toolset as a whole and keep track of platform-specific updates and upgrades. Where it makes sense, build templates or advertise existing ones to make it easy for individual teams to customize the tools.
  1. Add an official password manager to your digital toolset. This is one instance where adding a tool—a password manager— to the digital workplace toolset makes sense and serves a very important purpose: keeping employee data and company data secure.

Conclusion

When it comes to your digital workplace tools, more is not always better: these tools impact the workplace experience and keeping track of them can increase employees’ workload. Avoid redundant tools and don’t introduce new tools just because they are trendy. For example, a new tool may allow employees to perform a certain task one minute faster than what’s possible with existing tools. But if it takes two minutes extra to locate the tool, then the net gain is negative. Even worse, users may be delayed in doing all their other tasks due to the systemic impact of tool abundance: more decision time to consider the available tools to determine which one to use, more navigation time to reach the chosen tool from among the masses of options, and more execution time to complete the task due to reduced learning-curve gains when each individual tool is used less often.

When new tools are deemed viable and brought onboard, clearly state their purpose and lead with the key benefits of the tool, so employees don’t see them as added burdens. Giving everyone admin access and hoping for tools to catch on organically is not a viable strategy. You must consider how new tools will work with existing ones and what success looks like for adoption and usability in the workplace.