Digital overload is real and climbing

Tuesday March 23, the UK marked one year since the first coronavirus lockdown and our move to a 100% workplace

Recent survey results from Microsoft show how the digital intensity of workers’ days has increased substantially, with the average number of meetings and chats steadily rising since last year. Specifically, collaboration trends in Microsoft 365 between February 2020 and February 2021 show:

• Time spent in Microsoft Teams meetings has more than doubled (2.5X) globally and, aside from a holiday dip in December, continues to climb.
• The average Teams meeting is 10 minutes longer, up from 35 to 45 minutes year-over-year.
• The average Teams user is sending 45 percent more chats per week and 42 percent more chats per person after hours, with chats per week still on the rise.
• The number of emails delivered in February 2021, when compared to the same month last year, is up by 40.6 billion.
• There was a 66 percent increase in the number of people working on documents.

This barrage of communications is unstructured and mostly unplanned, with 62 percent of Teams calls and meetings unscheduled or conducted ad hoc. And workers are feeling the pressure to keep up: despite meeting and chat overload, 50 percent of people respond to Teams chats within five minutes or less, a response time that has not changed year-over-year. This proves that the intensity of our workday, and what is expected of employees during this time, has increased significantly

There is hope, however, that hybrid work will offer some reprieve.